Marjorie Estiano, the perfect heroine who walked out of the telenovela

Marjorie Estiano

Photo: Wallace Pires from Rio de Janeiro, Brasil / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 8, 1982 Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil
Occupation	Actress
Known for	I'm Still Here, Good Manners, Paradise Lost

TV Globo has a standing request that Marjorie Estiano keeps turning down. The network that made her famous wants her back in a telenovela, and she keeps answering with work of another shape: a socialite shot dead by her lover on a Búzios beach, a law professor who reopens a conviction with a room full of students. Asked at an awards night this year what it would take to return to the daily grind of a soap, she did not talk about scripts or co-stars. She talked about labour law. “Let’s wait, maybe a five-by-two turns up in the law,” she said, meaning a guaranteed two days off a week. “That would make it a lot easier.” The joke was also a diagnosis. The actress the genre once crowned its perfect heroine has built her best years on refusing the terms that came with the crown.

Curitiba, the capital of Paraná in southern Brazil, is where Marjorie Dias de Oliveira was born, the second of three children. She was doing amateur theatre at fifteen, in productions of Lisístrata and A Casa de Bernarda Alba, and at eighteen, after a technical theatre course at the Colégio Estadual do Paraná, she moved to São Paulo. There she studied music for two years at the Faculdade Paulista de Artes, sang in a troupe of waiters who performed numbers from Grease and Cabaret between tables and got through the first rounds of the SBT talent show Popstars.

A place in TV Globo’s actors’ workshop took her to Rio de Janeiro. Born on 8 March 1982, she was in her early twenties when her first fixed role arrived on Malhação, the network’s long-running teen soap, as Natasha, the villain who played bass in a fictional band called Vagabanda. The songs outlived the plot. Universal Music signed her, her self-titled debut album went platinum and the single “Você Sempre Será” reached the top of the Brazilian charts.

Prime time followed quickly. She played Marina in Manoel Carlos’s Páginas da Vida and then carried Duas Caras as Maria Paula, a young woman torn between love and revenge. Viewers were cool on her at first, but the author, Aguinaldo Silva, praised her almost minimalist playing and called her “a mocinha perfeita”, the perfect heroine. Glória Perez cast her in Caminho das Índias. In A Vida da Gente she was Manuela, a young woman rejected by her mother who raises her comatose sister’s child, and in Lado a Lado, opposite Camila Pitanga, she played Laura, a teacher and journalist who scandalises early twentieth-century Rio by divorcing her husband. That telenovela won the International Emmy. She turned down the role of Elis Regina in a stage musical to finish an album.

Império was the last telenovela she made. She was cast as the young Cora, the villain of the first phase, and took the part back when Drica Moraes, who played the older Cora, left for health reasons. Her return was widely praised, and then she stopped. Two years later the miniseries Justiça gave her Beatriz, a dancer left quadriplegic after being run over, who asks her husband, played by Cauã Reymond, to help her die.

The part that defined that change was Carolina, a surgeon in a broken public hospital in Rio, first in Andrucha Waddington’s film Sob Pressão and then across five seasons of the series, opposite Júlio Andrade. Its second season earned her a nomination for the International Emmy for Best Actress in 2019. It ended in 2022, the same year her fixed contract with Globo came to an end and she began to choose projects on her own terms.

The heroic reading of that story leaves out what it cost and what it has not yet delivered. The restraint Aguinaldo Silva praised is the same quality that made her the default choice for virtuous women for nearly two decades, and she has said as much herself. Of Ângela Diniz she told O Globo: “Even though Ângela was murdered, I thought: finally, I’m going to play a woman who has sex, drinks and gives herself to pleasure.” The music stalled for seven years between her second album, Flores, Amores e Blablablá, and her third, Oito, which included a duet with Gilberto Gil, and it has been quiet since. Her cinema has been more uneven than her television. She is often the best thing in a film rather than the reason it exists: reviewers of the thriller Precisamos Falar praised her and Hermila Guedes and called the film a disappointment, and her parts in other directors’ prestige projects have mostly been supporting ones.

She played Ruth in Fim, Fernanda Torres’s adaptation of her own novel for Globoplay, and the adult Eliana Paiva in Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here, the film that won Brazil the Oscar for Best International Feature. In the Netflix horror film Abraço de Mãe she was Ana, a firefighter evacuating a nursing home during the Rio storms, and in Marco Dutra’s Bury Your Dead, from Ana Paula Maia’s novel, she played Nete, the girlfriend and boss of Selton Mello’s roadkill collector, who drifts into an apocalyptic sect. Earlier, Juliana Rojas and Dutra’s werewolf fable Good Manners had already shown how far she would go from the telenovela heroine.

The leading roles came on streaming. In Ângela Diniz: Assassinada e Condenada, the HBO Max miniseries Waddington directed from the Rádio Novelo podcast Praia dos Ossos, she plays the socialite whose killer, Doca Street, walked free after his first trial on a plea of defence of honour. Waddington said she was his first and only choice. “She was a woman who was killed because she would not submit to anything,” Estiano said of her, and insisted the case is not history: “This story is still urgent.” In September 2026 Netflix released Habeas Corpus, the platform’s first Brazilian legal drama, with Estiano as Inez, a law professor whose students review the case of a young man convicted of a crime he says he did not commit. A day later Precisamos Falar, a Brazilian take on Herman Koch’s novel The Dinner, reached cinemas with her as Sandra opposite Alexandre Nero.

Since 2022 she has been in a relationship with Márcio Maranhão, the doctor whose book inspired Sob Pressão, so the series that changed her career also changed her life. She has called her adolescence terrible and now speaks of a lighter phase built on therapy and exercise.

Habeas Corpus is streaming now, and the question Globo keeps asking remains open. She has not said never. She has said she does not know, and that a change in the law would help. Until then, the perfect heroine is busy playing everyone the title left out.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Habeas Corpus, Marjorie Estiano, Andrucha Waddington, Ângela Diniz: Assassinada e Condenada

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‘Habeas Corpus’ on Netflix reopens the case Brazil’s courts closed

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