There are a number of TV shows I’ve fallen in – and then just as swiftly out of – love with over the years. I often make arbitrary lists (titles such as “most awful lead character” or “services to eyewear”, for example). One series that never budges from my “best titular character” list is Channel 4’s Ugly Betty. And that’s almost entirely down to its star, played by Honduran-American actor America Ferrera. She’s a ray of sunshine.
Let’s get straight to it: her name is not a big act of patriotism – her due date fell on a Latin American holiday called the Day of the Americas – and Ferrera, 32, didn’t love it (she went by her middle name Georgine for years). I first saw her in her breakout role as Betty Suarez, the (“TV-ugly”) braces-and-spectacle-wearing outsider working at a fashion magazine. Betty was a star in the sitcom of her life and, in Ferrera, she shone. She made Betty into a wholesome rebel, the type of girl to root for, even in a garish technicolour soap world. For four seasons her face was the canvas on which the show painted an easy warmth, and an intense sort of human kindness.
As Natalie Flores in The Good Wife, she showed even more depth, and a quiet strength. Ferrera’s aura is thoughtful, and she has described herself as “earnest” – her brow furrows like a cliche school nerd, and her smile is disarmingly open. It makes me seek her out every time she’s on screen. She’s luminous.
These days she’s in the OK sitcom Superstore but is excelling as a champion for Hillary Clinton and her presidential campaign (as she did back in 2008). “Not everybody looks at [the children of immigrants] and sees an investment,” she said at the Democratic national convention last month. Ah, but luckily, some of us do.
