The reigning queen of the “telenovelas” is teetering on the edge of a couch at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Fla., shoulders thrust back in perfect “Miss Universo” posture, chest aimed like a missile toward a camera lens.
She is making love to Brazil. Cooing like a throwback starlet. Lavishing the latest country to fall under her spell with that trademark I-would-die-for-you gaze.
Thalia, who is as big a Spanish-language soap actress as she is a pop singer, has been spending a lot of time in Miami these days, recording a new album with crossover guru Emilio Estefan.
That’s why a Brazilian TV crew had to “schlep” all the way to the Biltmore to get her to tape a one-hour segment for “Domingo Legal,” Brazil’s version of the hugely popular show “Sabado Gigante.”
An interviewer, speaking a jumble of Portuguese and Spanish, asks about her favorite Brazilian music.
This, it turns out, is not Thalia’s forte. But just when it looks like she’ll be hard-pressed to offer much more than a cursory humming of “The Girl from Ipanema,” she comes up with a save.
“What I need is a Brazilian boyfriend who will take me out to hear some of that fabulous music. I’ll be in Brazil very soon,” she says with a tousle of highlighted hair that cascades to her celebrated Barbie-doll waist. (Her fans are forever locked in debate over whether she had surgery to remove a couple of ribs, but Thalia insists she was naturally gifted with a 22-inch waist.)
Seducing Brazil should be a breeze. Thalia Ariadna Sodi Miranda, the little girl who grew up in Mexico dreaming of being an Olympic gymnast, already has made millions of people all over the world froth with her sexy kitten “shtick” and her bittersweet Cinderella yarns.
They are devouring her from Miami to Mexico City, San Antonio to San Salvador. China loves her, Egypt loves her, Greece loves her, Indonesia loves her.
But no country has it worse for Thalia than the Philippines (she has just finished recording a CD for the Philippines in Tagalog). Things got so out of control there last year that the time slot of her novela had to be changed by presidential decree because wives had stopped tending to their husbands at dinner time. Lawmakers in a town north of Manila even went so far as to order the local power company not to schedule power outages during her daily broadcast.
“Very seldom do we see our people in Guimba preoccupied and mesmerized with such a soap opera,” a city councilman told reporters. “And to deprive them of such enjoyment would be to act like a killjoy.”
The Philippines is also the place where a man was stabbed to death by his cousin because he was watching Thalia and refused a request to change the channel–and the place where a mother reportedly suffocated her baby with a pillow because the baby was screaming over “Mari Mar,” Thalia’s biggest hit in a trilogy of novelas (the first made its debut in 1992) that have made her an international phenomenon.
Thalia (pronounced tah-LEE-ah) has gotten used to the fan worship. But she’s wide-eyed when you tell her about the two women among the guerrillas holding the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Peru who commandeered the TV there every day at rifle-point to watch her on “Maria la del Barrio” (7 p.m. weekdays, WGBO-Ch. 66).
That’s the soap that now has Spanish-speaking audiences across the United States glued to their TV sets.
“I hadn’t heard that one,” she says, eyebrows arching with a hint of amusement. “Those poor hostages. They’re going to have nightmares about me.”
At 25, she has proven to be the most bankable novela star of the 1990s with her three Mexican-produced hits known as “Las Tres Marias–Maria Mercedes,” “Mari Mar” and “Maria la del Barrio.”
The novelas are unrelated, but in each she plays a variation on a young, pretty girl named Maria who suffers the indignities of the lower class, only to eventually find her rightful place in society. Of course, the shows always feature some love-lost-and-found yarn and a happy ending where all the villains and villainesses get theirs.
Thalia’s Marias always get the leading man–and the mansion.
“Mari Mar,” which played in the United States last year, broke ratings records regularly, beating even the Super Bowl among Spanish-speaking audiences.
“Maria la del Barrio” may not have quite reached “Mari Mar” status, but it’s still the No. 1 show on Univision, with a daily prime-time audience of more than 2.2 million.
“Everything she touches turns to gold,” says Blanca Telleria, a spokeswoman at the Spanish-language network’s headquarters in Miami. “She is, without question, the queen of the novelas right now.”
Thalia, who got her first break at age 12, performing in a Mexican staging of “Grease” (she started out in the chorus and was playing Sandy, the lead, just a few weeks later), is dreaming far beyond “novelas.” She’s after Hollywood.
“You can make films in a lot of countries, but they don’t have very wide releases,” says Thalia, whose main residence is still in Mexico, but who also has a Los Angeles-area house in Bel-Air and is in the midst of intensive English classes. “Hollywood movies are seen throughout the world. The ultimate dream is a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame.”
“I think this is the moment for Latinos in Hollywood,” she says. “You go to Los Angeles or New York or Miami or Chicago, and you see Latinos everywhere; they are involved in every part of American society. That’s why they have to start being represented in Hollywood, because an `Americano’ can’t walk down the street and not see a Latino. Hollywood has to start representing Latinos simply because they are a part of real life in America.”
