Late bloomer

Brazil's latest icon is new to film. Now, she's a star of an Oscar contender

- ANA IONOVA

Even shielded by dark sunglasses, Tânia Maria de Medeiros Filha can’t step outside these days without fans fawning over her.

“Wherever I go, people recognise me,” the 79-year-old actress said. “It’s marvellous,” she added. “But it hasn’t gone to my head.”

No, Medeiros doesn’t have a decades-long career as a leading lady of Brazilian cinema. In fact, she has just a few credits to her name, some of them as an extra. Before setting foot on a film set for the very first time a few years ago, she spent her days weaving rugs in her sleepy hometown in Brazil's northeast.

Now, Tânia Maria, as she is commonly known, is causing a major cinematic stir at home and abroad with a show-stealing performance in Brazil’s latest buzzy film The Secret Agent, released in Thai cinemas this week.

With a modest but captivating 11 minutes on screen, Tânia Maria has drawn praise from international film critics, grabbed newspaper headlines and amassed more than 100,000 followers on social media in just months. And the movie that has catapulted her to fame overnight earned four Oscar nominations recently.

Tânia Maria, for one, chalks up the frenzy to her authenticity in a role not far from her real-life persona.

“I think it's because of my simplicity,” she said in an interview this month, in between takes for her next film. “I am that person. I am Mrs Sebastiana.”

The Secret Agent, a slow-burning political thriller set in the late 1970s, tells the tale of a former professor, played by a melancholic Wagner Moura, who finds himself on the run from Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship. When he seeks refuge in a safe house in the city of Recife, he is welcomed by his hostess - Mrs Sebastiana, played by Tânia Maria.