The transgender star giving TV drama a very modern twist
WITH stunning good looks and a femme fatale figure, she was the perfect choice to play a sexy siren in the BBC’s new Sunday night drama series Baptiste.
And the plot twist that saw her character revealed to have previously been a man was also a fitting surprise.
For Talisa Garcia underwent gender reassignment surgery at the age of 18 and admits she worried she would never be a ‘normal woman’.
The Chilean-born actress, 45, was a boy called Joseph before her transition.
She stars as brothel madam Kim Vogel in the six-part BBC1 thriller, a spin-off from the acclaimed hit drama The Missing.
At the end of the first episode, French detective Julien Baptiste, played by Tcheky Karyo, discovered Garcia’s character was formerly male sex-trafficking mastermind Dragomir Zelincu.
Ms Garcia’s character lives with a man who is deeply in love with her, but is unaware that she is transgender.
And this is a situation that the actress is very much familiar with, as Ms Garcia admits her stunning good looks meant that many of her friends – and even former boyfriends – did not know she was transgender.
‘For me, it has always been a secret,’ she said. ‘I was a bit embarrassed, I suppose, of not being a “normal” woman.
‘I look different to a lot of transgender people and have been extremely lucky. I was just a woman and no-one ever questioned it. So I kept it hidden.’
Ms Garcia has no idea who her natural parents are as she was separated from them as a baby during the violent Chilean military coup in 1973.
She was found in the streets and adopted by a university lecturer and her engineer husband. The family fled Chile in 1977 and eventually settled in Swansea, Wales.
They moved to London when she was 13. Having become severely depressed as she could not cope with being male, she attempted suicide. With the support of her parents, she underwent a seven-hour-long genital reconstruction surgery at the age of 18.
‘I don’t expect everyone to accept me, and there’s nothing wrong with it if people don’t – as long as we’re all civil to each other,’ Ms Garcia told The Daily Telegraph.
She has also appeared in Silent Witness and Doctors, but Baptiste is her biggest role to date.
‘No-one ever questioned it’