Spanish VIPs
Mercedes Milá (1951)
Mercedes Milá has been a wellknown face on Spanish television for several decades. The oldest of six siblings born into a well-connected Catalan family, Mercedes changed her university course from Philosophy to Journalism after one year and as soon as she graduated from Barcelona University, started to carve out her journalistic career.
Her younger brother Lorenzo Milá is also a very well known journalist and is currently working for Spanish national television TVE as a correspondent in Washington. However, Mercedes career has taken a radically different path from her brother’s in more recent years.
She started her career as a radio journalist and then moved over to Spanish television, working for four years as a sports reporter. Despite her talents being recognized when she made television appearances, most of her work at this time was behind the scenes. However, in the mid-eighties she became somewhat of a television phenomenon on the debate and interview programme ‘De Jueves a Jueves’ in which her relaxed manner, her way of addressing the camera directly and her incisive style of interviewing turned her into one of the most popular journalists on television.
After a series of other debate-style programmes on various television channels, she made a dramatic shift in career by presenting the reality show ‘Gran Hermano’ (Big Brother). With very few breaks, she has continued as the main anchor on the programme for nearly fifteen years. The role has provided her with a platform to express the more extravagant and often outrageous sides to her personality. She has appeared in a whole range of outfits, including 19 traditional Spanish costumes, has performed a nearstriptease and dealt with Big Brother participants with varying degrees of affection and belligerence which have, if nothing else, helped to maintain the programme’s audience over a record fourteen editions.
Her spontaneous declarations have occasionally got her into trouble, such as when she sent her best wishes to the singer Isabel Pantoja on her entrance into prison for moneylaundering. Mercedes was heckled by the studio audience but she justified her statement to the camera by saying “One should always remember people who are having a bad time, all of them, as you never know how things can end up.”
Apart from her television work, Mercedes Milá has worked tirelessly to promote healthy living and was awarded special recognition by AECC (the Spanish association against cancer) for her campaigns against the use of tobacco.