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America Ferrera
With her role as Betty
Suarez on the hit ABC television show Ugly Betty, the actress
America Ferrera has helped to redefine beauty in an industry in
which waistline measurements often matter more than talent. Prior to
her work on the show, Ferrera, as a curvaceous Latina woman,
struggled to find acceptance in the Hollywood community; although
she knew from an early age that she wanted to pursue acting, she
found few parts intended for actresses of her ethnicity and body
type and few casting directors willing to look beyond those factors.
Those early struggles have frequently found parallels in the lives
of the characters Ferrera has since portrayed on screen. Her first
feature film, Real Women Have Curves (2002), brought Ferrera a
Special Jury Award for acting at the Sundance Film Festival. Her
next major role, in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005),
was another that echoed her real life; her portrayal of Carmen, a
daughter of divorced parents who yearns to be accepted by her
father, earned praise from critics who were surprised to find a
performance of such depth in what promised to be a superficial
teenage drama. As the title character of the comedy Ugly Betty,
Ferrera—and her refreshing take on beauty and celebrity—has begun to
garner national attention. “I'm not a model. I never wanted to be a
model. I never wanted to do ads for Neutrogena. That's not what I
set out in my life to do,” Ferrera told Rick Bentley for the Fresno
(California) Bee (August 20, 2006). “I set out to tell stories. I
set out to represent real people. And to me, Betty is the most
beautiful opportunity that's ever come across my path to represent a
whole generation of young women who don't recognize themselves in
anything they're watching.” In her first season of portraying the
lovable, braces-clad Betty, Ferrera won both a Golden Globe Award
and a Screen Actors Guild Award for best actress in a comedy, honors
that affirmed her belief that there is a place in film for actors of
diverse appearances. As she told Doug Elfman for the Chicago
Sun-Times (November 2, 2006), “I can't go out there and save the
world, but if I can look at the child next to me and make them feel
alive and like they are not invisible for a second, that feels like
a real reward.”
The youngest of six sisters, America Georgina Ferrera was born on
April 18, 1984 in Los Angeles, California. Her parents, who are both
Honduran, divorced when she was young; her mother, whose name is
also America, raised the children. “The way my mother raised me and
the values she instilled in me allowed me to be persistent,” Ferrera
told Claudia Puig for USA Today (October 18, 2002). “She taught me
you can be whatever you want, no matter what people say.” Ferrera,
who grew up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood of the Los
Angeles suburb Woodland Hills, has said that her ethnicity was never
an issue for her until she ventured into Hollywood for auditions.
“Then people saw me as Latina,” she recalled to Loren King for the
Boston Globe (November 10, 2002). “The label was instant.” Ferrera
started acting at age eight, when she was cast in a
junior-high-school production of Romeo and Juliet. From then on she
was determined to become an actress, despite receiving little
encouragement. “It was like saying I wanted to go to the moon,” she
told Puig. “People would say, ‘What are you talking about? You don't
look like anything special.’” At 16 Ferrera signed with a small
talent agency, working as a waitress to pay for her first acting
classes and taking the bus to her first auditions because her mother
would not drive her. After she proved to her mother that she was
serious about acting, however, the elder America began to drive her
daughter to the auditions. Ferrera auditioned for a full year
without a single callback, a reaction she attributed to her
relatively large physical stature. “I went through a lot of
self-doubt,” Ferrera told Elizabeth Weitzman for Interview (October
1, 2002). “I never turned on the TV and saw a Latina woman with an
average body and I thought, I'll never be a Charlie's Angel, because
I can't fit into size zero leather pants.” Meanwhile, Ferrera
attended El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, where her
interactions with other students did little to help her self-esteem.
She found the process of auditioning, however, to be even worse in
that regard. “I didn’t even know I was fat until I started acting,”
she said, as quoted by Bentley.
Ferrera’s figure, though, would be the key to her breakout role in
HBO Films’ Real Women Have Curves. (Earlier in 2002 she had appeared
as a cheerleader in the Disney Channel’s original movie Gotta Kick
It Up.) Playing Ana Garcia, the daughter of an immigrant family who
is torn between accepting a scholarship to an Ivy League school and
working for the family business, Ferrera was the movie's emotional
anchor, representing both the literal and metaphorical curves women
face in life. “America came in for seven callbacks. It was such an
important role; we knew the movie depended on that,” the film's
director, Patricia Cardoso, told King. “She's one of the smartest
people I've ever met. The crew often forgot she was only 17.”
Originally intended to be aired solely on HBO, the film received
such an overwhelmingly positive reaction after its premiere at the
Sundance Film Festival that HBO Films decided to distribute it
nationwide. The premiere was the first occasion on which Ferrera saw
the movie—indeed, the first on which she saw herself on a movie
screen. She left Sundance with a Special Jury Award for acting,
which she shared with her co-star, Lupe Ontiveros; she was also
subsequently nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. “I got so
lucky,” Ferrera told Dixie Reid for the Sacramento (California) Bee
(June 1, 2005) about the role. “But it was not easy. It was hard. It
was my first movie, my second project ever, and I had to be in every
single frame. And then I had to confront all these things that are
very relevant to my life, the whole image thing.” Regarding the
“image thing,” Ferrera said that her character, Ana, was an ideal
role model—both for her audience and herself. “I really liked
playing this girl because she's so confident,” Ferrera told Cindy
Pearlman for the Chicago Sun-Times (October 25, 2002). “I think her
confidence is actually contagious. It's so important to show young
girls that you have to be strong to survive in this world.” Most
important, Ferrera said, was the movie’s message: “You leave this
movie feeling happy about who you are,” she told Weitzman. “And
that's something we're all hungry for.”
After filming Real Women during her senior year of high school, Ferrera, like her character Ana, faced a choice—in Ferrera's case,
whether to go to college or pursue her acting career. After
graduating first in her high-school class, Ferrera decided to defer
for a year from the University of Southern California (USC), where
she planned to major in international relations, “because I wanted
my life outside of acting to be, you know, a life,” as she explained
to Cindy Pearlman for the Chicago Sun-Times (May 29, 2005). Instead,
she took a role in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, a movie in
which four teenage girls share one pair of jeans, sending them back
and forth, during a summer when they are separated from one another.
Based on a popular series of books by Ann Brashares, the film seemed
at first to Ferrera to be light fare. “That script just sat on my
desk for months,” the actress told Bob Strauss for the Daily News of
Los Angeles (May 29, 2005). “My agent was like, ‘Have you read it?
Have you read it?’ I'm like, ‘I'll get to it,’ and I finally did,
begrudgingly so. But halfway through, I thought, ‘Wow, this is
great.’” The film, which deals with issues ranging from first love
to the death of a loved one, appealed to Ferrera in large part
because of the complexity of her character, Carmen—the half-Latina
daughter of divorced parents who goes to visit her father for a
summer and feels left out of his all-white family. A daughter of
divorced parents herself, Ferrera said that she could identify with
Carmen’s struggle. “I wouldn't say my acting in this movie just
comes from my life,” she told Pearlman, “but I didn't have to
stretch too far for the feelings of being isolated, abandoned and
out of place.” While she co-starred with other up-and-coming
actresses, Alexis Bledel and Amber Tamblyn, Ferrera’s scenes—helped
by a story line considerably more compelling than those of the other
actresses' characters—stole the movie. “Ferrera is the star of this
show, no doubt about that,” Allison Benedikt wrote for the Chicago
Tribune (June 1, 2005). Many critics, like Ferrera, found the movie
to be far more poignant than they had expected.
Later in 2005, while pursuing her degree at USC, Ferrera appeared in
a variety of smaller projects. In Lords of Dogtown, a dramatized
history of competitive skateboarding, she played the small role of
Thunder Monkey. She also returned to Sundance for the premiere of
How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer, which garnered her a Movieline Breakthrough of the Year award. In December of that year,
Ferrera appeared in the Off-Broadway play Dog Sees God: Confessions
of a Teenage Blockhead. She also became a spokeswoman for the Dove
Campaign for Real Beauty, a series of advertisements for the
cosmetics company that featured people without model-like figures.
She told Jessie Milligan for the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram
(May 31, 2005) that the ads were especially useful for giving young
women a better standard of beauty than that usually proferred by the
media. “I hope young girls understand the manufactured images around
them,” Ferrera said, commenting on typical advertisements featuring
stick-thin models. “It’s those people’s job to look like that.”
By taking the title role of Betty Suarez in the 2006 breakout hit
television show Ugly Betty, Ferrera made it her job not to project a
typical image of female stardom. Based on the hit telenovela
(Spanish soap opera) Yo Soy Betty, la Fea—which translates as “I am
Betty, the Ugly”—the show follows Betty’s trials and tribulations as
the ugly duckling at a high-profile New York fashion magazine. The
distinctly unglamorous role appealed to Ferrera instantly, as she
told Mike Parker for the Sunday Express (January 7, 2007). “As soon
as [executive producer] Salma [Hayek] showed me the script, I knew
it mirrored some of the insecurities I had—and still have. There's a
vulnerable nakedness to Betty. She's an awkward young woman
determined to succeed in a world which seems as though it has been
specifically designed for hip people only. I think audiences look at
her and say, ‘I can recognize my own clumsiness, my own awkwardness,
my own insecurity there.' There are times you feel sexy and
confident and there are times you feel like Betty.” More than 14
million viewers tuned in to watch the show, making it the number-one
new TV program in the U.S. Though Ugly Betty has a mostly female
audience, its viewers are of diverse ethnicities and ages; it is
among the top 20 shows among the highly sought-after
18-to-49-year-old demographic, as well as among the top 20 shows
with viewers who earn an annual salary of $100,000 or more. Among
Latinos, Ugly Betty is the highest-rated new English-language show
in terms of total number of viewers, as well as the number-one show
with viewers between the ages of 18 and 49. Much of the show's
appeal is attributed to Ferrera’s endearing portrayal of Betty.
“Ferrera’s performances are small wonders to behold,” Tim Goodman
wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle (September 27, 2006).
Ugly Betty was nominated for a 2007 Golden Globe Award for best
comedy, and Ferrera won the award for best performance by an actress
in a television series—musical or comedy. In her acceptance speech,
Ferrera said that she was grateful for the opportunity to present a
body image on television more realistic, and therefore encouraging,
than those she grew up watching. As quoted by Susan Abram in the
Daily News of Los Angeles (January 22, 2007), she said, “It's such
an honor to play a role that I hear from young girls on a daily
basis how it makes them feel worthy and lovable and that they have
more to offer the world than they thought.” Responding to Ferrera’s
earning the Golden Globe Award, the Democratic U.S. congresswoman
Hilda L. Solis of California made a statement on the floor of the
House of Representatives, as quoted by US Fed News (January 17,
2007): “Madame Speaker, I rise today to congratulate America Ferrera
for winning the Golden Globe for best actress in a comedy for her
work in the ABC show Ugly Betty. . . . Through her work, Ms. Ferrera
is breaking down barriers for Latinos in prime-time television. I
commend America and everyone involved in Ugly Betty for helping to
break down stereotypes and provide a role model for young Latinas.” Ferrera agrees that the role—which requires her to don braces,
bright red glasses, and a disheveled, frizzy wig—is about redefining
standards of beauty for the public, and she said that it has also
helped her to create a new understanding of beauty for herself. She
told Bentley that she never feels “more confident, more beautiful
and more pretty on the inside” than when she portrays Betty. “I wish
that one day, as America, I can feel the way that I feel when I'm
Betty. When I'm Betty, there's a light that shines from the inside
and it's so wonderful to be her.” Ferrera also won a Screen Actors
Guild Award for outstanding performance by a lead actress in a
comedy series for her work on Ugly Betty.
Ferrera recently starred in and executive-produced the short film
Muertas, directed by her boyfriend, the filmmaker and fellow USC
student Ryan Piers Williams. She starred in and executive-produced
the bilingual independent film Towards Darkness, released in 2007;
the movie is based on the 2004 short film Darkness Minus 12, which Ferrera appeared in as well. Also due in 2007 is
Boy, Immigrant,
which features Ferrera in a Spanish-speaking role. As of January
2007, Ferrera had one semester of course work left to complete her
degree.
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