guiding lights

These five women remain models for a healthy career in a complex, often unforgiving industry.

- PHILBERT DY

It is very difficult to sum up the careers of the five women we celebrate here, representing over six decades of work on Filipino screens—both in cinemas and on televisions. The youngest among them, Alessandra de Rossi, has been working in the industry for over twenty years, and she’s taken on many different roles in front of and behind the camera. There is much to say about each of them, much that they have accomplished in each of their storied careers.

Perhaps it is easier to take a much wider view: how each of them represent a different era of the surreal world of the Filipino entertainment industry; how their varying backgrounds and journeys represent the changing tastes and values of the Filipino viewer over the decades.

It is the sixties, just past the first golden age of Filipino Cinema, and the industry was producing genre fare at the behest of its two biggest stars: Dolphy and FPJ. And the industry needed actresses who could play in those waters, and with her natural comedic chops Nova Villa just seemed to fit the role. Plucked out of college by FPJ, a 17-year-old Villa would star in five films in 1964, one of them opposite Dolphy in Sa Daigdig ng Fantasia, a massive production that had them traveling with a boy scout troop to a world filled with magical creatures. She would become a mainstay in comedy, anchoring several sitcoms through the seventies and eighties.