America Ferrera

America Ferrera (born April 18, 1984, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) is an American actress, producer, director, and activist who rose to fame with her portrayal of the upbeat, quirky, braces-wearing assistant to the editor in chief at a high-end fashion magazine in the hit series Ugly Betty (2006–10). For that role she became the first Latina and the youngest person (at age 23) to win the Emmy Award for best lead actress in a comedy series. Her performances in the films Real Women Have Curves (2002) and Barbie (2023) have also received widespread acclaim.

Early life and beginning of her career

Ferrera is the youngest of six children born to Honduran parents América Griselda Ayes and Carlos Gregorio Ferrera. Her parents had immigrated to the United States in the 1970s. When Ferrera was seven years old, her parents divorced, and her father returned to Honduras, where he died in 2010. Ferrera, her brother, and four sisters were brought up in Woodland Hills, a Los Angeles neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, by their single mother, the director of housekeeping at a Hilton hotel. Ferrera, who is named for her mother, disliked her name as a child and went by her middle name, Georgina, for many years.

Ferrera’s interest in acting came at the age of seven when she appeared in her elementary school’s production of Hamlet. She continued to act in school plays and community theater while attending George Ellery Hale Middle School and El Camino Real High School. While in high school, Ferrera landed her first onscreen role in Disney Channel’s original movie Gotta Kick It Up! (2002). That same year she was cast in the coming-of-age film Real Women Have Curves, playing Ana Garcia, a bright Mexican American high school senior with a weight-obsessed mother. The part is considered Ferrera’s breakthrough, and she was awarded the Special Jury Prize for acting at the Sundance Film Festival.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and other roles during the early 2000s

In 2003 Ferrera enrolled at the University of Southern California to study international relations. She juggled coursework with her acting career, including a guest spot (2004) on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and roles in such movies as Lords of Dogtown and 3:52 (both 2005). That year Ferrera also joined the casts of How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer, a well-received independent film about three generations of Mexican American women and their search for love and honesty, and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, a movie adapted from a young-adult novel recounting how a group of friends stays connected during a summer apart by passing a pair of thrift shop jeans among themselves.

Ugly Betty

Ferrera was about a semester away from graduating when she was cast in the titular role of the television series Ugly Betty, coproduced by Salma Hayek. An American adaptation of the Colombian telenovela Yo Soy Betty, la Fea (1999–2001), the comedy-drama premiered in 2006 and had Ferrera wearing a wig, stick-on eyebrows, and clip-in braces to play the lovable but unfashionable Betty Suarez, assistant to the editor in chief of Mode, a fictional high-end fashion magazine. The series was a hit, and Ferrera was critically and popularly praised for her performance. In addition to her Emmy Award for best actress in a comedy series, she also won the Golden Globe Award and the Screen Actors Guild Award for best actress in a comedy in 2007. Ferrera consequently paused her studies to focus on her acting career.

Roles during Ugly Betty, personal life, and graduation

During Ugly Betty’s four seasons (2006–10), Ferrera appeared in the film Towards Darkness (2007), which she also executive produced, the sequel (2008) to The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and Our Family Wedding (2010). She starred in The Dry Land (2010), which was written and directed by Ryan Piers Williams, her boyfriend since college, and whom she married in 2011. The couple later had two children, a son, Sebastian Piers Williams (born 2018), and a daughter, Lucia Marisol Williams (born 2020). In between, Ferrera returned to her studies, graduating in 2013 with a bachelor’s degree.

How to Train Your Dragon, Superstore, and other roles in the 2010s

Meanwhile, Ferrera lent her voice to the character Astrid in the animated film How to Train Your Dragon (2010). In the subsequent decade, she reprised the role in the television series DreamWorks Dragons (2012–14) and Dragons: Race to the Edge (2015–18), two film sequels (2014 and 2019), a TV movie (2019), and a number of video games. Ferrera’s other roles from the early 2010s include the movies It’s a Disaster (2012), a dark comedy about four couples stuck in a house together as the world is about to end, and End of Watch (2012), a documentary-style crime drama. She also had a part in her husband’s film X/Y (2014).

Get Unlimited Access

Try Britannica Premium for free and discover more.

Subscribe

Ferrera returned to television as a cast member and producer of the popular sitcom Superstore (2015–21). Building off the documentary-style workplace comedies The Office and Parks and Recreation, the series followed the lives of a group of fictional big-box store employees and their misadventures. Ferrera portrayed Amy, a confident employee on a quest to become store manager. She also directed a number of episodes. The series has been called one of television’s best shows about American life in the 2010s.

Barbie and other roles from the 2020s

In the 2020s Ferrera had roles in the Apple TV miniseries WeCrashed (2022), about the rise and fall of the start-up WeWork, and the film Dumb Money (2023), based on the book The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich, recounting the 2021 GameStop short squeeze, in which a loose group of amateur traders come together to drive up the value of the video game retailer’s stock. Perhaps Ferrera’s most significant project of the early decade, however, was Barbie (2023). Director and co-writer Greta Gerwig penned the role of Gloria, the undervalued assistant of Mattel’s CEO, with Ferrera in mind. (She also cast Ferrera’s husband in a small role as Gloria’s husband). In the movie, Ferrera delivers a much-talked-about monologue regarding the difficulty of meeting society’s contradictory expectations for women. The movie went on to break numerous 2023 box office records, including the highest-grossing worldwide film ($1.44 billion), and Ferrera was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actress.

Activism

In addition to acting, producing, and directing, Ferrera has advocated for several causes, including women’s rights, gender equality in entertainment, immigration reform, racial justice, and environmental conservation. She cofounded (2016) such nonprofit organizations as HARNESS to further these causes.