Women in Hollywood – America Ferrera

The beloved role model is finally empowered to tell her own story

When America Ferrera was 17 and acting in her debut film, Real Women Have Curves, she stripped down to her underwear with other jiggly women and marveled at how beautiful their bodies were-cellulite, stretch marks, and all. A defiant Ana, played by Ferrera, said to her mom: "How dare anybody try to tell me what I should look like or what I should be when there's so much more to me than just my weight?"

Ferrera didn't intend to be groundbreaking in that moment. She didn't mean to challenge what audiences saw onscreenthat was just the way her body looked and she was an actor in a movie, playing a role that required more confidence than she says she actually had in real life. Like Ana, Ferrera was just a teenager with big dreams: "I didn't set out to be a role model, or to break barriers, or to have a career about defying the norm," Ferrera says over breakfast at Sant Ambroeus in the West Village. "I just wanted to be an actress."

When she was starting out, Ferrera says she had no idea how to go from being the "broke-ass daughter of a single mother" of six, who'd immigrated to Los Angeles from Honduras via Miami, to building the life and career she wanted for herself: "I was just looking for any and every opportunity, and you feel grateful when you find water in the desert."

In daring to exist onscreen-as the lone member of the foursome in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants who worried the jeans wouldn't fit, and as the titular star of Ugly Betty, for which she would go on to become the first and only Latina to win a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series-Ferrera was praised for setting a new standard for who and what a Hollywood star could be.