from Chicago Sun Times / by Cindy Pearlman

It was not a graceful beginning. When Catalina Sandino Moreno was offered a role in her first Hollywood movie, it wasn’t an agent who turned down the offer.

Her mother just said no.

One must understand that Moreno comes from a long line of very strong women.

The Bogota native’s mother is a pathologist — and a woman very weary of Hollywood men coming to Colombia and trying to corrupt her beautiful 17-year-old daughter with visions of stardom.

Most mothers would be suspicious. One day Moreno was a shy student studying advertising at a local university. The next, she got a call saying she was cast as the lead in “Maria Full of Grace,” now showing in Chicago.

“It was pretty shocking,” Moreno says. “I went home and told my mom, ‘I’m going to Ecuador to film a movie and I’m postponing a semester of school.’ My mom said, ‘You’re not going anywhere with anyone. I want to meet this director.’ ”

In the end, it turned out to be a great career move. Moreno is receiving raves, and her film was the hit of the last Sundance Film Festival.

In “Maria Full of Grace” Moreno plays 17-year-old Maria Alvarez, a young girl in Colombia who lives in a house jammed with three generations of relatives. Her day job is the thankless task of removing thorns from flowers at a rose plantation.

Suddenly, Maria is offered a highly lucrative job that involves travel and excitement. The position is known as drug “mule” and she must do everything and anything to survive while bringing drugs into the United States. Specifically, she carries a heroin-filled condom of drugs inside her stomach in the hopes of eluding U.S. Customs.

Joshua Marston, screenwriter and director, says he based Maria on real-life women in Colombia who lead dead-end lives. They turn to drug-running out of desperation or to help their own families keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

The means they use to hide drugs is not for those with weak stomachs.

“Some have had buttock implants to fill themselves with drugs. There was another woman who was stopped at U.S. Customs holding a baby. It was a dead baby and its carcass was filled with drugs,” the director says.

Of course, there are girls who die because of medical complications. “It’s typical for the drugs to burn through the condoms and then the girl dies.”

This angst seemed like perfect movie fodder, but from the start Marston’s biggest problem was finding his Maria. He scoured the Colombian communities in New York and New Jersey but came up with nothing. Then Marston sent a casting team down to Colombia.

“We scoured schools and community centers. I had my people drive around with a megaphone on top of their car announcing auditions,” he says.

Some 800 girls later, he still didn’t have his Maria. Finally, the Colombia team sent him a tape of a dozen new auditions, and there was Catalina Sandino Moreno.

But there was a twist. She wasn’t that interested in acting and was studying advertising at a local university.

Moreno says, “It was very strange. My mother received a phone call one day saying, ‘I hear your daughter has studied theater in the past. An American film is searching for a Colombian girl,’ ” she recalls.

Doing the taped audition was a lark. “I was curious. I thought, ‘I’ll never be in an American movie, but I want to be part of this process,’ ” she says.

As for the actual acting, Moreno insists it wasn’t a lifelong love of hers. “I was just a very shy girl and one day I came home from school crying. I told my mother that I had this terrible shyness and I was so scared to give a speech at school. I told her I couldn’t say a word in front of other people.

“My mother enrolled me in a theater class to help me,” she says. “I liked it, so I studied for 15 years with a very good teacher, but I never thought I’d become an actress. I was going to do something serious with my advertising diploma.”

Well, not so fast.

Moreno’s very strict mother was very wary of Hollywood invading her small town.

The director says, “Showing up in a strange country and saying you’re looking for a 17-year-old girl for a movie is not the most believable thing in the world. I had to take Catalina’s mother out for dinner to have a nice long conversation. Mostly, I had to convince her that it really was a movie.”

The subject matter of the film hit home for Moreno. She cautions that people shouldn’t hate the girls in Colombia who find themselves in this terrible life. “I sympathize with them. I understand. That’s how I played Maria. I had to care about her. She just made bad decisions.”

The young actress says she didn’t know any mules in Colombia. “I’d hear about these girls on the news and think, ‘Those are bad people.’ But if you listen to a news story, you never understand why they did it. You just knew they were carrying drugs. These girls would go to jail and I’d say, ‘Good.’

“Now after doing this movie, I’m much more aware of what’s going on in my own country,” she says with great sadness.

Moreno doesn’t want to dwell on depressing issues. The shy actress smiles when asked about her toughest critic’s response to the film.

“My mom looked up at me on the big screen and said, ‘You look so skinny!’ But by the fourth time she saw the movie, she said, ‘I like that Maria girl.’ She’s very proud of me and happy.”

Since the movie, Moreno has moved to the United States and lives in New York. “I have an agent now and we’ll see what happens,” she says, adding that she really misses Colombia. “I miss my family. I miss my bed. I’ve had the same bed since I was 10 years old. I also miss the food.

“But most of all it’s hard to be away from my grandmother, eight cousins and my brother. It’s a big, happy, crazy family and I miss all of them so much, but they’re supporting me. My mom always told me, ‘If you want to do it, just go do it.’

“I’m going to do this for her,” she says.