#Annette charles photos movie#
#Annette charles photos full#

Bernadette's,' Cha Cha tells us when we first meet her. Cha Cha was, for a few minutes at least, the undeniable star of the show.

#Annette charles photos movie#

Watching her on screen, I knew she was the bad girl, the other - the girl, as Frenchie informs us, 'with the worst reputation.' But she was also a magnetically confident, voluptuous Latina, and to mix my movie allusions here, there was no putting this baby in the corner. Curvy, saucy and dark-haired, she was the mirror opposite of our fair Sandy. Self-conscious about my already-curvy backside (this was way before J.Lo) and my plump lips (also before Rosario Dawson.) I was a dab of cinnamon in a bowlful of vanilla, and I stood out. (I sometimes joked that I was black Irish.) I felt disoriented. after living in Latin America, and my mother had insisted on enlisting me in a parish school where the entrance exam apparently included Irish ancestry. In the suburban Maryland Catholic parochial school I attended at the time, I was the other, too: a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl with a foreign-sounding name in a sea of light-eyed, light-haired McTavishes and Pecks and Flannerys. Those that did exist were often portrayed as the other, as my women's studies professors might have once put it, pushed to the margins of the narrative. And at the time I'm recalling - this was the mid-'80s - there weren't too many representations of Latina women on film and TV. In fact, Charles was a stage name the actress was born Annette Cardona, of Mexican and Italian ancestry.

#Annette charles photos full#

It's only now, as I see her character's full name spelled out in online obituaries, that I realize perhaps she was meant to be Italian. As that dance-off unfolded on my living room TV screen, I couldn't take my eyes off Cha Cha: Her screen time was minimal, but, oh my, was she memorable. Ela também fez várias aparições na televisão. She reprised that role for the film version as well. Annette Charles foi uma atriz norte-americana mais conhecida por seu papel como Charlene 'Cha Cha' DiGregorio no filme Grease de 1978. Manoff went on to win her first Tony award after Grease, for her role as Libby Tucker in I Ought To Be In Pictures. It was the beginning of my long, and often awkward metamorphosis from little girl to pubescent ball of hormones and budding womanhood. Dinah Manoff played Marty Maraschino in the 1978 film, one of the pink ladies who hooked up with the handsome Vince Fontaine at the dance.

I remember watching Grease when I was 10 or so. Cha Cha dances with Danny Zuko the way it was meant to be.