Hollywood actors might rule the silver screen — as Sunday’s Academy Awards are poised to prove — but Brazil’s path to stardom often starts under the bright lights of a TV studio rather than a sprawling movie set.
Since at least the 1960s, the telenovelas, or soap operas, produced by the country's leading broadcaster TV Globo have evolved from simple daily dramas into a multi-million-dollar industry with 13 studios, three set towns, 122 edit bays and reaching up to 60 million of Brazil's 213 million people every week.
