Sofía Vergara: The Life Story Behind the Colombian Star

Sofía Margarita Vergara Vergara was born on 10 July 1972 in Barranquilla, Colombia, the same Caribbean port city that produced Shakira, and she grew up in a large, close, comfortably-off Catholic family with five siblings, a childhood of family gatherings, beach days and the loud, warm chaos of a Colombian household. Nobody in that household expected her to become the most famous Latina actress on American television. She was studying dentistry at a university in Colombia when a photographer spotted her on a beach in Barranquilla and asked if she would model. She said yes to a Pepsi commercial, and that single yes, made when she was seventeen, set a life in motion that would carry her from Colombian television to a sitcom watched by tens of millions of Americans, from a Kmart clothing line to a Netflix crime drama in which she disappeared so completely into a drug lord that critics who had laughed at her accent for a decade suddenly wrote about her acting.

What makes Sofía Vergara’s story worth telling is not just the fame, which is considerable, but the fact that she built it twice. The first time, she built it in Spanish, as a model and television host in Latin America. The second time, she built it in English, in a country where her accent was treated as a joke before it was treated as an asset, and where she had to learn to turn the thing people laughed at into the thing that made her unforgettable. Between those two careers came real loss: the murder of her younger brother, a cancer diagnosis at twenty-eight, and years of being underestimated by an industry that saw the beauty first and the brain much later, if at all. She outlasted all of it, and she did it with a business sense that has made her one of the richest actresses in television history.

A Barranquilla Girlhood and a Photographer on the Beach

Sofía grew up in Barranquilla as one of six children, in a family where her mother, Margarita Vergara Dávila de Vergara, kept a busy household and her father, Julio Enrique Vergara Robayo, ran a cattle business. The family was well known in the city, and Sofía’s childhood was, by her own account, happy and ordinary: school, church, cousins everywhere, and the long Caribbean summers that Barranquilla is famous for. She was a striking child, tall and blonde in a country where that look stood out, and she was used to being noticed, but nothing in her early life suggested a plan for fame. She enrolled at the National University of Colombia to study dentistry, and for a time it looked as though she would become a dentist in Barranquilla and live a quiet professional life.

The turning point came on a beach when she was seventeen. A photographer saw her walking with friends and approached her about modelling, and the result was a Pepsi commercial that aired across Colombia. The commercial made her recognisable at home, and modelling work followed, but it was still a side job rather than a career, something she did while studying. At nineteen she married her high-school sweetheart, Joe Gonzalez, and in 1991 their son, Manolo Gonzalez Vergara, was born. The marriage ended in divorce two years later, and Sofía became a single mother at twenty-one, raising her son with the help of her family while she tried to work out what came next. It is a part of her story she rarely dramatises, but it matters, because the woman who later negotiated some of the biggest television contracts in history learned early what it meant to be responsible for another person and to make decisions with a child’s future in mind.

In the mid-1990s, work began to pull her toward television. She moved to Bogotá to host television shows, and her warmth on camera, her quick humour and her complete lack of stiffness made her a natural. She was not a trained actress, and she did not pretend to be one. She was a presenter who could talk to anyone, laugh at herself, and hold an audience, and in Latin American television, those are the skills that matter most. The work paid well, the audience grew, and for a few years it looked as though she would spend her career as a Spanish-language television star, famous from Mexico to Argentina, unknown in the United States.

Miami, Univision and a Second Career in Spanish

In the late 1990s, Sofía moved to Miami, Florida, a city that had become the capital of Spanish-language television in America and the natural home for a Colombian presenter who wanted a bigger stage. Univision, the Spanish-language network, gave her work hosting travel and entertainment shows, including “Fuera de Serie” and “A Que No Te Atreves”, programmes in which she travelled, interviewed celebrities and presented with the easy confidence that became her trademark. She was building a name, earning good money, and raising Manolo in a city where Spanish was spoken everywhere. It was a comfortable life, and she might have stayed in it.

Then, in 1998, her younger brother Rafael was murdered in Colombia during a kidnapping attempt, a loss that devastated the family and changed Sofía’s relationship with her home country. She has spoken about Rafael rarely and with great pain, and the family moved more of its life to the United States in the years that followed, in part for safety. The tragedy is the darkest chapter of her life, and she has never used it as material for interviews or publicity. It sits behind the bright public image as a reminder that the glamour was built by a woman who knew real grief, and who kept working through it without asking the audience to feel sorry for her.

Miami also brought a different kind of test. In 2000, when she was twenty-eight, Sofía was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. The diagnosis came as a shock: she was young, healthy and at the height of her television career. She underwent surgery to remove her thyroid, followed by treatment, and she has taken daily thyroid medication ever since. The cancer was treated successfully, and she has spoken about it in later years to encourage others to get checked, but at the time she kept the illness largely private and continued working. It was the second time in two years that life had reminded her how fragile plans are, and it is no coincidence that the years after her recovery were the years in which she began to push hardest for a career in English. She had survived something that could have ended everything, and the fear of being told no by Hollywood casting directors must have seemed small by comparison.

Breaking Into Hollywood One Small Role at a Time

Sofía’s first English-language film roles were small and, frankly, often built on the same stereotype she would spend years fighting: the fiery Latina, the beautiful girlfriend, the comic relief. She appeared in “Big Trouble” in 2002, Barry Sonnenfeld’s comedy, and in “Chasing Papi” in 2003, a romantic comedy in which she played one of three women chasing the same man. The films were not hits, and the roles were thin, but they gave her something she needed: credits on an American résumé, experience working in English on a Hollywood set, and a Screen Actors Guild card. She followed them with a part in “Four Brothers” in 2005, John Singleton’s action film, in which she played the girlfriend of one of the brothers, and with guest spots on American television.

What is striking about these years is how patient she was. Many actresses in her position would have returned to the comfort of Spanish-language television, where she was already a star and the money was good. Sofía stayed in Los Angeles, took the small roles, worked on her English, and waited. She has said that she never tried to hide her accent, and that decision, which some agents would have called a mistake, turned out to be the smartest choice of her career. Her accent was not a flaw to be corrected. It was the most distinctive thing about her voice, and in a business where most actresses sound interchangeable, distinctive is valuable. She was betting that an audience would eventually want to hear a woman who sounded like a real Colombian, and the bet paid off beyond anything she could have imagined.

The waiting ended in 2009, when she was cast as Gloria Delgado-Pritchett in “Modern Family”, a new comedy from ABC about three related families in Los Angeles. The role was written for a Colombian woman married to a much older American man, Jay Pritchett, played by Ed O’Neill, and it called for exactly the qualities Sofía had: warmth, comic timing, a thick accent, and the ability to be both glamorous and completely unpretentious. She auditioned, and the producers knew immediately that they had found their Gloria. What nobody knew, not the producers, not Sofía, not ABC, was that the show would run for eleven seasons and become one of the most loved comedies of its era.

Eleven Seasons as Gloria and the Accent That Became an Asset

“Modern Family” premiered in September 2009 and was an immediate success, winning the Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series in its first year and holding that award for five consecutive years. Sofía’s Gloria was the breakout character: a woman who mispronounced English words in ways that became catchphrases, who loved her family fiercely, who wore tight dresses and high heels while cooking and shouting, and who was, underneath the comedy, the emotional centre of her family. Audiences adored her, and the show’s writers, who had at first written her accent as a joke, learned to write it as a character trait, giving her long, funny speeches about Colombian life that became some of the show’s most memorable scenes.

The recognition came quickly and kept coming. Sofía was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series four times, in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013, and she was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress four times as well. She did not win either award, a fact that has been noted with some surprise by critics who consider her performance one of the great comic turns in television history, but the nominations put her in a category with the finest comic actresses of her generation, and they made her, for the first time, a serious name in Hollywood rather than a novelty. The show also made her rich. Her salary grew with each season, reportedly reaching hundreds of thousands of dollars per episode in the later years, and Forbes named her the highest-paid actress on television for several years running, from 2012 onwards, a title she held for five consecutive years.

Off the set, she was building something else entirely. While “Modern Family” was filming, Sofía launched business after business: a clothing line sold through Kmart, furniture and home goods, eyewear, a perfume line, and later a beauty brand, Toty, built around sun protection. She understood something that many actors miss, which is that fame is a wasting asset unless you turn it into a business, and she turned it into several. Her clothing line was aimed at ordinary women shopping at Kmart, not at the luxury market, and it sold because it was designed by a woman who understood what real women want to wear. The businesses made her far more money than acting ever did, and they gave her a freedom that most television stars never have: the freedom to choose her next role for the art rather than the pay cheque.

Films, Judging and the Woman Behind the Laugh

During the “Modern Family” years, Sofía kept working in film, choosing roles that were often broader and funnier than Gloria. She voiced a character in “The Smurfs” in 2011, played a villain in Robert Rodriguez’s “Machete Kills” in 2013, and appeared in Jon Favreau’s “Chef” in 2014 as Inez, the ex-wife of Favreau’s chef character, a warm and grounded performance that showed a quieter side of her acting. In 2015 she starred opposite Reese Witherspoon in “Hot Pursuit”, a comedy about a police officer protecting a drug lord’s widow, and she voiced the character of Flamenco Dancer in “The Emoji Movie” in 2017. None of these films changed her career the way “Modern Family” had, but they kept her visible on the big screen, and they showed a range that television audiences did not always see: she could be menacing, vulnerable and silly, sometimes in the same scene.

In 2020, the year “Modern Family” ended, she joined “America’s Got Talent” as a judge, replacing Gabrielle Union, and she has remained on the panel ever since. The job suited her perfectly. A talent show judge needs to be warm, funny, honest and quick, and Sofía, who had spent twenty years hosting television in two languages, had all four qualities in abundance. The show gave her a weekly presence on American television after the sitcom ended, and it introduced her to a new generation of viewers who had never watched “Modern Family”. She has also hosted and appeared on the Spanish-language version of the show, and her judging style, enthusiastic, emotional, unashamedly sentimental, has become one of the programme’s signatures.

Her personal life in these years was public, and she handled it with the same directness she brings to everything else. In 2014 she became engaged to the actor Joe Manganiello, and they married in a lavish ceremony in Palm Beach, Florida, in November 2015, a wedding that was covered around the world. The marriage lasted eight years, and in July 2023 the couple announced their divorce, with Manganiello reportedly filing papers citing irreconcilable differences. Sofía has said little about the split in public, beyond confirming it and asking for privacy, and she has been photographed since then living her life in Los Angeles and Miami with the same energy she has always had. She also became a grandmother in the years after “Modern Family” ended, through her son Manolo, and she has spoken with delight about the role, which suits a woman who has always put family at the centre of her life.

Griselda and the Performance That Changed Everything

For all her success, there was one criticism Sofía Vergara could never quite escape: that she was playing herself, that Gloria was not acting but personality, that a beautiful woman with a funny accent could not be a serious actress. She heard it for fifteen years, and she answered it in the most decisive way possible, by taking a role that had nothing to do with glamour and everything to do with menace. In 2024, Netflix released “Griselda”, a six-part drama in which Sofía played Griselda Blanco, the real-life Colombian drug lord known as the Godmother of Cocaine, who built a billion-dollar empire in Miami in the 1970s and 1980s and was responsible for extraordinary violence.

The transformation was total. Sofía wore prosthetic teeth and a prosthetic nose, gained weight, changed her posture and her voice, and played Blanco as a woman who was by turns terrified, ruthless, maternal and terrifying, a mother who loved her sons and ordered murders in the same breath. Critics who had dismissed her for years wrote reviews that read like apologies. The performance earned her nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series, the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Miniseries, and the Screen Actors Guild Award, the first time she had been recognised as a leading dramatic actress. She did not win, but the nominations changed the conversation about her permanently. Nobody who watched “Griselda” could say afterwards that Sofía Vergara was only a comic actress. She had shown, at fifty-one, that she was only getting started as a dramatic performer.

The role also mattered because of who Griselda Blanco was. Blanco was a Colombian woman, like Sofía, who had come to Miami and built an empire, though hers was built on cocaine and murder rather than television and clothing lines. Sofía has spoken about the care she took in playing a real person whose victims were real, and about the research she did into Blanco’s life, her family and her crimes. It was a risk: playing a drug lord could have been seen as glamourising a criminal, or as a Latin actress being typecast in a narco role. Sofía took the risk because the character was complex, the writing was serious, and the chance to show what she could do was too rare to refuse. The gamble paid off, and “Griselda” became one of the most-watched series on Netflix in early 2024.

The Business Empire and a Life Built on Her Own Terms

Today, Sofía Vergara’s wealth is estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and almost none of it comes from a single source. The “Modern Family” salary made her rich. The businesses made her wealthy. The clothing line, the furniture, the eyewear, the beauty brand Toty, the endorsement deals, the “America’s Got Talent” salary and the Netflix drama have combined into a portfolio that would impress any chief executive, and she runs it with the help of her son Manolo, who has become her business partner and manager, and her long-time manager Luis Balaguer, with whom she founded the talent management and entertainment company Latin World Entertainment. The company represents Latin talent in Hollywood, and it is part of a larger mission she has pursued quietly for years: to open doors for Latin performers who come after her.

She became a naturalised citizen of the United States, and she lives between Los Angeles and Miami, close to her family, her son and her work. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, awarded in 2015, and she has been named one of the most powerful women in the world by Forbes. She has also used her platform to talk about thyroid cancer, encouraging fans to get their thyroids checked, and to support education and health causes in Colombia. The image the public sees, the laughing woman in a tight dress with perfect hair, is real, but it is only the surface. Underneath it is a woman who was a single mother at twenty-one, who buried a brother, who survived cancer, who was told her accent would hold her back, and who turned every one of those facts into fuel.

The story of Sofía Vergara is, in the end, a story about refusing to be one thing. She refused to be only a model, only a Spanish-language host, only a sitcom wife, only a beautiful face, only a businesswoman. She was all of those things, in sequence and sometimes at the same time, and each one made the next one possible. The girl from Barranquilla who was discovered on a beach did not become famous by accident. She became famous by saying yes to the small jobs, surviving the terrible losses, learning a second language well enough to make millions of people laugh in it, and then, when everyone thought they knew exactly who she was, showing them a drug lord they never expected. That is not luck. That is a career built, decision by decision, by a woman who understood from the beginning that nobody was going to hand her anything, and that she would have to build it herself.

What Her Story Proves About Being Underestimated

It is worth pausing on the simple fact that Sofía Vergara was underestimated at every stage, and that the underestimation was the opportunity. Casting directors saw a model and missed the comic timing. Sitcom audiences saw a funny accent and missed the businesswoman negotiating contracts that made her the best-paid actress on television. Critics saw Gloria and missed the dramatic actress who was waiting, patiently, for a role like Griselda Blanco. Each time, the people who underestimated her gave her room to surprise them, because they were not watching closely enough to see what she was building. That is a useful thing to remember about any career that looks easy from the outside. The ease is usually the performance, and the work is usually hidden, done early in the morning, in a second language, by a woman who learned young that nobody else was going to do it for her.

My Take:

What I keep returning to in Sofía Vergara’s story is the accent, because it is the detail that everyone notices first and almost everyone misunderstands. When she arrived in Hollywood, the advice she must have heard a hundred times was to soften it, to take lessons, to sound more American. She did the opposite. She kept the accent, she let the writers build jokes around it, and she turned it into the most recognisable voice on American television. I think that decision deserves more credit than it gets, because it was not stubbornness. It was a calculation, and a brave one. She was betting that audiences were tired of hearing the same polished American voice from every actress, and that a real Colombian accent, worn with confidence rather than apology, would feel fresh. The bet paid off for eleven seasons, and it paid off in a way that changed the business: after Gloria, American television became noticeably more willing to let Latin characters sound Latin. That is a small revolution, and it started with one woman refusing a voice coach.

The second thing that stays with me is how long she waited. Sofía spent years in small film roles that did not use her properly, playing girlfriends and comic relief in movies nobody remembers, while she could have gone back to Univision and been a star in Spanish. Waiting is the hardest part of any creative career, because it looks from the outside like doing nothing, and the people around you start to suggest, gently, that perhaps it is time to be realistic. She waited anyway, and when “Modern Family” came, she was ready for it in a way she would not have been five years earlier. Her English was better, her comic timing was sharper, and she had learned, from all those small roles, exactly what a camera does to a performance. The waiting was not wasted time. It was rehearsal, and the audience only saw the performance.

I also think the business side of her story is the part young readers should study most carefully, because it is the part that made everything else possible. Most actors treat fame as the goal, and they are surprised when the fame fades and the money goes with it. Sofía treated fame as raw material. While she was on the most popular comedy on television, she was building a clothing line for Kmart, a furniture line, an eyewear line, a beauty brand, and a talent management company. None of those businesses depended on her being young or beautiful forever. They depended on her understanding her audience, which was ordinary women who wanted to look good without spending a fortune, and on her willingness to put her name on products she actually believed in. The result is that she is wealthy in a way that does not depend on the next audition, and that wealth gave her the freedom to take “Griselda” at fifty-one, a role that paid less than a sitcom and mattered more. Freedom is what money is for, and she understood that earlier than most.

Her brother Rafael’s murder is the part of her story I hesitate to write about, because she has spoken about it so rarely, and I do not want to turn a family’s grief into a narrative device. But it would be dishonest to leave it out, because it explains something important about her. She lost her brother to violence in the country she loved, and she kept going. She did not become bitter in public, she did not use the loss as a story to sell, and she did not let it define her. She moved her family toward safety, she raised her son, and she built a career that took her further from the danger. There is a strength in that kind of quiet endurance that has nothing to do with glamour, and I think it is the real foundation of her public confidence. A woman who has survived that does not need to prove herself to a casting director, and the audience can feel the difference.

The thyroid cancer diagnosis at twenty-eight belongs in the same category. She was young, successful and healthy, and then she was not healthy, and she had to have surgery and take medication for the rest of her life. She handled it the way she handled everything else: privately, practically, without drama. She has spoken about it since, encouraging people to get checked, and that advocacy matters, because thyroid cancer is often found late precisely because its symptoms are easy to ignore. But what strikes me most is the timing. The diagnosis came just as she was deciding whether to push for a career in English, and surviving it seems to have removed the fear of failure. When you have been told you have cancer and you have come through it, the prospect of a bad audition loses its power. That is not a silver lining. It is simply what survival does to a person’s sense of proportion, and I think her career after 2000 shows it.

What about Gloria herself, the role that made her famous? I want to be honest about the fact that the character has always been a subject of argument. Some critics said Gloria was a stereotype, a loud Latina in tight dresses who mispronounced English for laughs, and they were not entirely wrong. The early seasons did lean on the accent for jokes, and some of those jokes would feel uncomfortable now. But I think the argument misses what Sofía did with the role over eleven seasons. She made Gloria a full person: a devoted mother, a loyal wife, a woman with a past in Colombia that included poverty and hardship, a character who could be furious, tender, ridiculous and wise in the same episode. The writers gave her speeches about her homeland that were genuinely moving, and she delivered them with a conviction that no stereotype could contain. A stereotype is a flat character. Gloria, by the end, was not flat. She was a person, and that was Sofía’s doing as much as the writers’.

The divorce from Joe Manganiello in 2023 is another chapter she has handled with a dignity that deserves noting. Celebrity divorces are usually a circus, with leaks, accusations and publicists fighting in the press. Sofía and Manganiello announced their split plainly, asked for privacy, and got on with their lives. There were rumours, of course, because there always are, but she did not feed them. She went back to work, she was photographed laughing with friends, and she let the work speak. I respect that, because it is easy to be dignified when things are going well, and much harder when a marriage is ending in public. The way she handled it told me the same thing her career has always told me: she is in control of her own story, and she does not hand that control to anyone else.

“Griselda” is the chapter I will remember longest, because it is the chapter that rewrites everything before it. For fifteen years, the conversation about Sofía Vergara was about whether she was really acting, and the conversation was, frankly, a little insulting. Nobody asked whether Ed O’Neill was really acting when he played Jay, or whether the other “Modern Family” actors were just being themselves. The question was only ever asked about the beautiful Latina with the accent, as if beauty and comedy were evidence against seriousness. “Griselda” ended that conversation in six episodes. The prosthetics and the weight gain were the least of it. What mattered was the performance underneath: the fear in her eyes, the coldness in her decisions, the love for her sons that made the violence worse rather than excusing it. I watched critics who had written her off for years struggle to find new words for her, and I found that satisfying, not because I enjoy seeing critics embarrassed, but because it proved something I believe about talent: it is usually there long before anyone notices it, waiting for the right role.

There is also something to say about the timing of “Griselda”. She was fifty-one when it was released, an age at which Hollywood usually stops offering actresses leading roles and starts offering them mothers and grandmothers. Sofía took a leading role at fifty-one that was darker, harder and more demanding than anything she had done at thirty, and she was nominated for an Emmy, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award for it. That is not a comeback. A comeback implies that something was lost. Nothing was lost. She was simply waiting for a role worthy of what she could do, and when it came, she was ready. If there is a lesson in that for anyone reading, it is that the industry’s timetable is not your timetable, and the age at which you are supposed to be finished is often the age at which you are finally ready to begin.

I think about her son Manolo a lot when I think about her story, because he is the thread that runs through all of it. She had him at nineteen, she raised him as a single mother, she brought him to Miami, and now he works beside her as her business partner. That is a thirty-year arc from teenage mother to business partner, and it tells you more about her values than any interview could. The fame, the money, the awards, the Netflix drama, all of it was built around a single decision made when she was nineteen: to take responsibility for a child and to build a life that would be worthy of him. Everything else followed from that. It is easy to forget, watching the glamour, that the glamour was built by a young mother who had every reason to settle for less and refused to.

Finally, I want to say what her story means to me as a whole, because it is not the story I expected when I started reading it. I expected a story about beauty and luck, a woman discovered on a beach who became famous because she was beautiful. What I found was a story about work, patience, grief, survival and business sense, a woman who was discovered on a beach and then spent thirty years proving that the discovery was only the beginning. The beauty opened a door. The work, the waiting, the businesses, the cancer, the loss of her brother, the decision to keep her accent, the decision to play Griselda Blanco at fifty-one, those are the things that built the career. Beauty fades. The other things do not, and Sofía Vergara’s story is proof of that. The next time someone tells you that a famous woman is famous only because she is beautiful, remember the girl from Barranquilla who studied dentistry, buried her brother, survived cancer, raised a son alone, built a business empire, and then, at fifty-one, gave the performance of her life. Remember that, and ask what else they might be missing.

One more thought before I finish. Sofía Vergara’s career is often described as a fairy tale, and I understand why, because the beginning sounds like one: a photographer, a beach, a Pepsi commercial. But fairy tales end at the wedding, and her story did not end there. It went on through divorce, single motherhood, a brother’s murder, cancer, years of small roles, eleven seasons of a sitcom, a business empire, another divorce, and a drug lord at fifty-one. That is not a fairy tale. It is a life, lived in full, with all the joy and all the loss that a life contains, and the woman who lived it is still working, still laughing, still building. The fairy tale version is easier to tell. The real version is better, and it is the one worth remembering.

If I could ask her one question, it would be about the waiting years, the small roles and the long auditions, because those are the years that made everything else possible. I suspect she would laugh, and say that waiting is just working without an audience. I think she would be right.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where was Sofía Vergara born?

Sofía Vergara was born in 1972 in Barranquilla, Colombia. The place shaped the early life and the work that followed, and Sofía has often been described as a proud representative of Colombia on the world stage.

What is Sofía Vergara best known for?

Sofía Vergara is best known as a actress, television host and businesswoman, and for Modern Family, which made Gloria Delgado-Pritchett a global television character. The work that followed turned that breakthrough into a lasting international career, with Hot Pursuit (2015) among the most recognised projects.

What was Sofía Vergara’s breakthrough moment?

The breakthrough came through Modern Family, which made Gloria Delgado-Pritchett a global television character. It was the moment when years of preparation met a wide audience, and it changed the scale of every opportunity that followed.

Has Sofía Vergara won any major awards?

Yes, the career includes multiple Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for Modern Family, and an Emmy nomination for Griselda. Beyond formal awards, the lasting recognition has come from audiences and from younger artists who cite Sofía as an influence.

What is Sofía Vergara’s most famous work?

Many fans would point to Hot Pursuit (2015), her comedy film with Reese Witherspoon. Other landmark projects include Griselda (2024) and Chef (2014), and each one marked a different stage of the career.

What is Sofía Vergara’s legacy?

one of the highest-paid television actresses in the world, and a businesswoman who turned fame into lasting companies. The story continues, and the influence on new generations of artists from Colombia is already clear.