Oscar winner Mira: Hollywood bias has blighted my career
OSCAR winner Mira Sorvino has claimed her career was blighted by Hollywood bosses who once typecast her as Latina, but now block her from playing such roles.
The Mighty Aphrodite star said she was offered only Hispanic, Brazilian, Portuguese and Italian parts until she dyed her hair blonde to play a prostitute in Woody Allen’s 1995 romantic comedy hit.
She now claims to be a victim of a new form of discrimination as political correctness in Hollywood means casting chiefs will no longer pick her to play characters from a different ethnic background.
‘Early in my career I couldn’t play a girl who wasn’t either Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Puerto Rican – like I couldn’t play a Joe Schmo girl from Middle America,’ the 54-year-old actress told the WTF podcast. ‘I only used to get characters with vowels at the end of their name.’
The actress, who was born in New York to a part-British mother and Paul Sorvino, a star of the film Goodfellas and of Italian descent, added: ‘It’s because of my exotic name, Mira Sorvino, because I didn’t change it.’
But Sorvino said she is also a victim of Hollywood’s latest bias, where her past roles are now out of reach.
Her comments come after Maureen Lipman recently criticised the casting of non-Jewish Helen Mirren as former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and controversy erupted over Oscar-winning Spaniard Javier Bardem playing Cuban-American actor Desi Arnaz opposite Nicole Kidman in Being The Ricardos.
Miss Sorvino said: ‘Now I can’t play half the roles that I played then because they would be seen as taking them away from somebody who was Latina. So I wouldn’t have been able to play at least three or four of the roles that I played early on because I was ethnically not authentic. You saw the big deal about Javier Bardem, there was a whole controversy that he’s Spanish and is playing Cuban.’
The mother-of-four also claimed she suffered discrimination for starting a family, saying: ‘I also lost several parts over the years from being pregnant.’
She said her career had begun to blossom again after a 20-year spell when she was confined to TV roles and independent films after rejecting the sexual advances of sexual predator producer Harvey Weinstein.