María Elena González

Born and raised on the beautiful island of Puerto Rico, I've been a movie lover since I can remember. The first American movie I saw when I was six years old was "The Sound of Music" which left me dreaming of someday being a performer in a musical. After much insisting, my father bought me the record and I would sing the the song "Maria", using my hair brush as my microphone, in front of the mirror in my bedroom, incessantly. Seeing Barbra Streisand in "Funny Girl" and Grace Kelly in "The Swan" made my dream of being an actress bigger and expanded to singing and dancing. Growing up watching Spaniard and Mexican movies, Puerto Rican "telenovelas" (soap operas), I was fascinated by these beautiful movie stars like Sara Montiel, Rocío Dúrcal, Marisol, María Felix, Marta Romero and so many more that I wanted to be just like them. My mother had me take flamenco/ballet, guitar and piano lessons. Unfortunately, when I was nine years old, my mother died tragically and all my dreams were shattered. Without my mother in my life, I was unable to find the strength, the support and encouragement I needed to follow my dreams. Her absence made everything so much harder and created a huge void in my life.
When I started high school, my English teacher suggested I join the Drama Club. Little by little I started building my self esteem and participated in school plays. This contributed to my new found love of theater which became a passion. I was so focused on it that my grades took a dive and had to cut back. My plans were to study drama at the University of Puerto Rico, but my father had other plans for me. He wanted me to get an American education at a college in the United States. In 1977, I began my college years at the College of New Rochelle in New York. At first, it was pretty intimidating being an 18 year old Puerto Rican teenager all alone in New York and I was very homesick. The cold weather was brutal and very hard to get used to. Making friends and good friends proved to be life changing. With my friends, these college years were some of the best years of my life. We simply had a lot of fun. Once again, in my freshman year, my English and Drama teacher, Father Bernard, suggested I join the Glee Club and Drama Club. I absolutely loved it so much that I begged my father to give me a year to attend the American Academy of the Dramatic Arts in NY. He did! That was one of the biggest gifts he could have ever given me and I will always be grateful for the education he worked so hard to make sure I had. During that year, I lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights were I was so happy to be part of a community of artists and enjoyed taking in all the features NYC had to offer in the arts. My father would visit me from Puerto Rico and we would always go to see a play or a musical. On a cold, winter day, while walking back to the hotel in Manhattan, my father informs me that I must go back to college and finish my degree. Needless to say, my world came tumbling down. So, I went back to the College of New Rochelle and completed my BA. Mission accomplished! Now I could concentrate on auditioning and start my acting career. I decided to stay in NY, against my father's wishes, with my boyfriend and went to many, many, many auditions. The common denominator and most frustrating reason I was not getting a role in anything, was my Spanish accent. In the early 80's, having fair skin and a Spanish accent, was not what casting directors where looking for at that time. They would say to me, "What are we suppose to do with you?," You don't look American and you're not dark enough to look Puerto Rican, but you have a Puerto Rican accent, but don't look Puerto Rican", "If you want to act, go back to Puerto Rico." You're English is not good enough for the stage here in NY." After a year of constant rejections, I was so devastated that I became very depressed and gave up on my dream of becoming an actress. Since giving up on my dream, I got married, had four children, worked a few jobs, lost my husband twenty years ago, became a grandmother and have been pursuing a new found passion which is screenwriting while trying to be casted as a background actor/extra in local productions at the age of 64. Being fully bilingual, I write scripts in Spanish and English hoping to write stories that resonate with the Hispanic, Spaniard and American audience. Right now, I'm learning to be a script reader and hopefully freelance as one in the near future. I just won an award at the International Screenwriting Competition for Outstanding Achievement in Writing for "The Saga of Little Alex", an adaptation of a manuscript my father wrote when I was a little girl. Also, I won two awards at the Majorca Atlanteans International Film Festival for my feature screenplay "La mentira piadosa" and my short script "Dos anillos". I'm so grateful for these recognitions and the encouragement they give me to continue my passion of telling stories that will touch people's lives and have an everlasting effect.