Some rum in Santa Barbara
By Alena Prime, Télé Star, 1987	Home   Cette page en Français

Margaret Michaels, the new Santana of Santa Barbara, plays the typical American woman. Her life could be used as a model to the candidates for happiness, such as it is conceived on the other side of the Atlantic. "I had a childhood like the ones described in the books of the American folklore. I grew in Virginia, in a colonial house, with a lot of windows and with red brick walls..."

Margaret takes a great pleasure to tell her story : "We were three children. Two girls and a boy. Each one of us had his room. My father was an engineer and my mother a librarian, she gave us since our younger age the love of books." Margaret's grandfather was one of these rich owners of Virginia : "I liked to spend the holidays at his place. We played hide-and-seek in the cotton and corn fields. We also rode horses a lot, for races with the children of the farm next to us."

Margaret gave up this family cocoon at twenty years old. She left for New York in company of one of the her childhood friends, who had obtained a job of model. Margaret was unaware of what she wanted to do of her life. She did not know herself any vocation, if it is not that of happiness. She found a small job, in a company of public relations. But very quickly, she get tired with routine in which she had plunged. She then began to meet the agencies to try to become in a model at her turn. And the chance smiles to her. After some photos in magazines, she has been hired as leading fashion model by rum Baccardi, a very appreciated white rum. Rid of the concern of earning her life, she then joined comedy lessons to fill her leisures, and also to learn how to become more natural in front of a camera. At these lessons, she met a young actor who advised her to leave New York, where she felt badly, to go to California to try her chance in Hollywood. He even gave her the address of one of his producer friends who could do something for her. "Thus I became in Los Angeles a production assistant. I was a little disappointed. But, very quickly, I was proposed small roles and it is thanks to one of these "breakdowns", like we say in this job, that one of the directors of Santa Barbara noticed me and hired me without any audition."

We know the remainder. Today, Margaret does not dream any more but of one thing : to find a place to make build a big house as she likes them to shelter her happiness with the man of her life, a very known aesthetic surgeon in California, and her old dog who, for eighteen years, has never left her. As about her leisures, Margaret occupies them by making polo, tennis, or bowling, a sport in which she won many trophies. "When I do not shoot, I also write, she timidly says, and I believe that I manage it rather well. Currently, I finish a scenario in collaboration with a friend." A scenario she does not want to reveal, but in which she, of course, reserved a role to herself !