Oscar winner Mira: Hollywood bias has blighted my career

THE couple who bought Ghislaine Maxwell’s London house last summer are selling up after making a rapid £850,000 profit. The property where Prince Andrew was photographed with Virginia Roberts has been snapped up weeks after going on sale for £2.6m.

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.

Ms Sorvino, pictured, now claims to be a victim of a new form of discrimination as political correctness 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 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 was born in New York to a part-British mother, Lorraine Davis, and Paul Sorvino, a star of the film Goodfellas and of Italian descent.

She said: ‘It’s because of my exotic name, because I didn’t change it.’

But Ms Sorvino said she is also a victim of Hollywood’s latest bias, whereby her former 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 Oscarwinning Spaniard Javier Bardem playing Cuban-American actor Desi Arnaz opposite Nicole Kidman in Being The Ricardos.

Ms 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-offour 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 has 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.