Sofía Vergara

Sofía Margarita Vergara Vergara (Spanish: [soˈfi.a βeɾˈɣaɾa], born July 10, 1972) is a Colombian-American actress, television producer, comedian, presenter and model. She has been the highest paid actress in American television for 7 consecutive years, from 2013-2019. Vergara rose to prominence while co-hosting two television shows for Spanish-language television network Univisión in the late 1990s. Her first notable acting job in English was in the film Chasing Papi (2003). She subsequently appeared in Four Brothers (2005) and the comedies Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns (2008) and Madea Goes to Jail (2009), receiving an ALMA Award nomination for the latter. In 2009, she began playing Gloria Delgado-Pritchett in the ABC comedy series Modern Family, for which she was nominated for five Golden Globe Awards, four Primetime Emmy Awards, and seven Screen Actors Guild Awards. Vergara has also had roles in the films The Smurfs (2011), New Year's Eve (2011), The Three Stooges (2012), Machete Kills (2013), Chef (2014), and Hot Pursuit (2015). She also had voice-over roles in the animated films Happy Feet Two (2011), Escape from Planet Earth (2013) and The Emoji Movie (2017). As of 2020, Vergara is a judge on America's Got Talent.

Vergara has naturally blonde hair. For movies and television, she is sometimes asked to colour her hair dark brown or black to make her look more stereotypically Hispanic.Vergara was married at the age of 18 to her high-school sweetheart, Joe Gonzalez. They have a son named Manolo, who was born in September 1991. They divorced in 1993.Vergara was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2000. She had her thyroid removed, underwent radioiodine therapy, and made a full recovery. She takes medication to prevent hypothyroidism.On May 9, 2011, Vergara's younger brother Julio was deported from the United States to Colombia after being arrested in April that year; Julio also had a longtime drug addiction and previous brushes with the law. Vergara told Parade magazine, "To see somebody dying over 10 years, little by little, that's the worst punishment. Now he's like another person."Vergara and her boyfriend Nick Loeb became engaged in 2012 after dating for two years. On May 23, 2014, Vergara announced that the engagement had been called off.Vergara and True Blood star Joe Manganiello became engaged on Christmas Day 2014 after dating for six months. They married in Palm Beach, Florida, on November 21, 2015.During her December 2014 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Vergara revealed that she had become a United States citizen after getting a perfect score on her citizenship test.In 2015, Forbes estimated Vergara's annual income at $28.5 million. As of September 2016, Forbes reported that Vergara was the highest-paid actress in television, bringing in $43 million in the past year. Embryo lawsuits. In 2015–2017, Vergara was involved in a legal dispute regarding the future of two fertilized embryos produced by in vitro fertilization while she was still in a relationship with Loeb; the embryos were kept in storage in cryopreservation in a medical clinic in California. Following the couple's split in 2014, Loeb filed a lawsuit for custody of the embryos in a California court, but he later dropped that lawsuit when the court demanded that Loeb identify two women who had abortions after he had impregnated them.In December 2016, a right-to-live lawsuit against Vergara was initiated in Louisiana with Vergara's embryos as plaintiffs. The embryos were named "Emma" and "Isabella" in the lawsuit, and their "trustee" was listed as James Charbonnet, a New Orleans resident of no relation to Vergara. The intent of the suit was to give the embryos a chance to further develop using a surrogate carrier, hence to be born, and to benefit from an inheritance trust that had been created for them and is administered by Charbonnet. While a contract between Vergara and Loeb had been signed prior to the creation of the embryos stipulating that neither party could use the embryos without the consent of the other, the lawsuit had tried to void this agreement. Loeb had written “Keeping them frozen forever is tantamount to killing them,” in a 2015 op-ed in the New York Times. The suit also tried to terminate parental rights of Vergara because by keeping them in cryopreservation in a medical clinic she allegedly abandoned and neglected the embryos. The legal case was novel and took advantage of Louisiana's embryo laws; the state passed a law in 1986 that declares embryos to be “juridical persons,” giving embryos the right to sue or be sued. In August 2017, a Louisiana judge dismissed the case on the grounds that the court had no jurisdiction over the embryos, which were conceived in California.

Vergara was born to a Roman Catholic family in Barranquilla. Her mother, Margarita Vergara de Vergara, was a homemaker, and her father, Julio Enrique Vergara Robayo, was a cattle rancher for the meat industry. She was nicknamed "Toti" by her five siblings and many cousins. Vergara initially studied dentistry for three years at National University of Colombia, but she left two semesters away from completing her degree to pursue opportunities in modeling and show business.In 1998, her older brother Rafael was murdered during an attempt to kidnap him. Not wanting to be caught in the unrest that resulted in the murder, Vergara emigrated to the United States, settling in Miami, Florida. Her cousin and adopted sister, Sandra, is also a television actress in the United States.