OK, so she's from Tenafly, New Jersey. But it's Barcelona that has an emotional hold on this Oscar-winning actress. It also has, she says, the world's best bread.
When Mira Sorvino arrived in Barcelona in 1994 to film a movie called Barcelona, she had a past in academia and a future in acting. Raised in Tenafly, New Jersey, she was the daughter of tough-guy character actor Paul Sorvino, who raised his kids to strive for an education instead of childhood acting careers. So Mira became a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard, where she majored in East Asian languages and became fluent in Mandarin. She gravitated toward acting after working on social projects targeting illiteracy and prejudice. In the course of playing a beautiful Catalan trade-fair girl in the film Barcelona, she fell for the city at her feet, returning again and again as her star rose: from a co-starring role in Robert Redford's Quiz Show to her breakthrough performance as a helium-voiced call girl in Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite, which won her a 1995 Best Supporting Actress Oscar and which was followed up by a 1996 Best Actress Emmy nomination for her role as Marilyn Monroe in HBO's Norma Jean and Marilyn. Since then, she's starred as an airhead blonde opposite Lisa Kudrow in Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, a lovelorn waitress in Spike Lee's Summer of Sam, and a street-tough master forger opposite Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat in The Replacement Killers. On January 20, she returns to TV as Daisy Buchanan in A&E's feature-length production of The Great Gatsby. When she gets some time off, and the ability to go anywhere, she'll return to Barcelona, the childhood home of Pablo Picasso and the palette of architect Antoni Gaudí. Here's a weekend in the port city where Mira Sorvino came of age as an actress.
FRIDAY