Ugly Betty shines in soap world

Ugly Betty shines in soap world

In some countries, Ugly Betty has a mole and buck teeth, in others oversized spectacles or fat thighs. Appearances aside, however, Ugly Betty is always a very popular girl.

Ugly Betty is the first South American soap opera heroine to become a global sensation. She appears in versions of the program from Moscow to Bombay.

Now Salma Hayek, the Oscar-nominated star of the films Frida and Desperado, is producing an English-language Betty to be shown in the US this September.

However, there is a ruse behind the Ugly Betty concept.

In 70 countries she is played by a naturally beautiful actress who finds scary ways to express what her fellow countrymen find uniquely off-putting in a modern woman.

In India, Mona Singh wears oversized shoulder pads, which express a lamentable lack of modesty; in Germany, the svelte actress Alexandra Neldel wears a thigh-thickening fat suit to indicate that she does not exercise.

The actress's hidden beauty makes it easier to stage the inevitable denouement in which the dowdy duckling metamorphoses into a swan, wins the heart of her attractive boss and saves his fashion empire. How quickly that happens depends on local ratings.

In Colombia, where Betty was born six years ago as the heroine of the nightly soap I Am Betty the Ugly, former beauty queen Ana Maria Orozco portrayed her with flattened hair and a moustache.

Three out of four Colombians watched Betty's antics every evening at the program's peak, causing cinema and bar owners to blame her for a disastrous downturn in business. There have been similar complaints in Russia, where the series is called Born Ugly.

Although her name may change from one country to the next, Betty is the same downtrodden but secretly brilliant secretary who works in a fashion house surrounded by snobbish, airhead models.

When Colombian Betty was offered a bribe, newspapers ran headlines appealing to her to be patriotic and not to surrender to temptation, "as so many real-life officials do".

When she rejected the bribe, she was compared to Joan of Arc. But when she slept with her boss, Armando, church leaders condemned her and called for a boycott -- which viewers ignored.

The program soon attracted the attention of Hayek, 39, who started her acting career in similarly overwrought shows in her native Mexico.

A British version is also in the pipeline, with an insider hinting that the British Betty "may be an old-fashioned librarian crossed with a female vicar, certainly with bad teeth. Teeth is what our Ugly Bettys are known for around the world".