Thalia’s Cinderella stories draw rabid fans

New York – Marzo 10, 1997

Thalia, 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.

But no country has it worse for Thalia than the Philippines (she’s 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.

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 debuted in 1992) that have made her an international phenomenon.

Source: Times Union