MEXICO CITY (AFP) ― Angelica Rivera is known as “La Gaviota” or The Seagull, the woman she portrayed in a hit telenovela, but Mexicans will soon have to get accustomed to addressing the former soap star as First Lady.
When Rivera, 41, married Mexico’s next president Enrique Pena Nieto in November 2010 she was more famous than him, and the soap star was a magnet for TV fans on the campaign trail, attracting young hordes that rarely vote.
She said little and did not speak to reporters while her husband campaigned but was often by his side, sometimes with children in tow.
At rallies, adoring fans would try to pose for a picture with her, ask for her autograph or to give her a kiss. “Gaviota! Gaviota!” they cried out from behind metal fences set up to contain the crowds.
There are plenty of pictures of Rivera in skimpy outfits, often posing with muscular, bare-chested men ― such as the October 1992 cover of a wrestling magazine where she poses with a practically naked wrestler called “Black Magic.”
But despite the glossy covers, Rivera has had a scandal-free life as she makes the transition from soap star to one half of Mexico’s political power couple.
The 45-year-old Pena Nieto, who looks the part of a telenovela heartthrob himself, married his first wife Monica Pretelini in 1993, and the couple had three children.
The then governor of the State of Mexico, home to 15 percent of Mexico’s 112 million people, admitted fathering children outside his marriage with two different women, but Pretelini died in 2007 of an epileptic fit.
The following year he met Rivera, who was divorced and also had three children. She was one of the Televisa stars that Pena Nieto hired in a controversial state program to publicize his good government work.
The relationship between the politician and the actress was at first discreet, some say even contrived. The two were seen together in restaurants, but their public displays of affection were timid.
When Pena Nieto announced that he was dating Rivera on a celebrity news show, the story became fodder for both political wonks and the celebrity press.
“We had been going out for about five months, and one day he invited me to dinner at a restaurant. Then he stared at me, slowly hugged me and asked if I wanted to be his fiancee,” Rivera told the celebrity magazine Quien in 2011.
“It was the first time someone asked, ‘Do you want to be my fiancee?’ Of course I said yes, and he answered: ‘Say yes properly.’ And I repeated more emphatically, ‘Yes, of course!’”
After months of dating, he presented Rivera with an engagement ring while on a visit to the Vatican in December 2009. Pope Benedict XVI even blessed the dashing couple.
At the time, Rivera was still basking in the glow of her success in the 2007 hit soap “Distilling Love,” and her role as “La Gaviota,” a field hand who falls in love with her employer’s handsome grandson.
TV cameras were not inside the cathedral of Toluca ― in the capital of the State of Mexico ― when the couple married in November 2010, but they were outside to film the A-list celebrity guests. Photos of the event were later released to the media.
The couple, of course, posed for pictures on their way out ― and Rivera threw her bouquet to fans. Both waved and blew kisses to the crowd.
Having Rivera as the country’s first lady is so jarring that a joke e-mail, purportedly sent by Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, has been making the rounds.
“If you have a picture of the future first lady of Mexico on the wall of your tire repair shop, please take it down,” reads the e-mail message. It includes pictures of a younger Rivera wearing skimpy bikinis.
Born Aug. 2, 1970, Rivera started her career as a teenage model, winning a beauty and talent contest at the age of 17.
She was quickly taken in by Televisa, Mexico’s giant entertainment and news conglomerate, and was mentored by Veronica Castro, the doyenne of Mexican soap operas. Years later, the two became in-laws when Rivera married Castro’s brother, Televisa producer Jose Alberto Castro.
Early in her career, Rivera appeared as a model in a video with Mexican superstar singer Luis Miguel, and by the late 1980s she was appearing in secondary roles Televisa soaps.
In 1991, now with died blonde hair, she made a big splash in her role as the “bad” girl in the telenovela “Reach for a Star II,” flirting with an innocent secondary actor ― the not-yet famous singer Ricky Martin.
“All men are unfaithful,” the young actress joked in a TV interview at the time, brought back to life via YouTube. In another she talks about the importance of her bottom, and how she flirts with men.
