>Daisy Fuentes
WHAT'S DRIVING MISS DAISY?
WHO'S THE MOST PERVASIVE TV PERSONALITY in the hemisphere? Got to be Daisy Fuentes. The effervescent VJ is the reason Beach MTV has been the summer's sunniest resort. The 26-year-old also hosts, in Spanish, the weekly MTV Internacional, syndicated here and in 17 Latin American countries. Married to model Timothy Adams, Fuentes has made acting appearances in the ABC soap Loving and appears in the season opener of PBS's kid-lit/mystery series Ghostwriter (Sun., Sept. 12, 6 p.m. ET).
Born in Cuba, Fuentes lived for a time in Spain as a child before her real estate investor father settled his wife, a painter, and two daughters in New Jersey. (They were permitted to emigrate from Cuba because Daisy's mother was a Spanish national.) Fuentes started modeling while a student at Bergen Community College. The wife of a TV executive encouraged her to apply for an on-air job at a Spanish station in New York City. Recalls Fuentes: "She was really impressed with my Spanish. She said we needed more young people who knew how to speak both languages properly." Fuentes started working as a weather anchor. "I hated that whole news thing. It was extremely boring," she says. So she shipped off an unsolicited audition tape to MTV in 1987. Things have been snowballing ever since. "Yeah," she says, laughing heartily, "I'm taking over the TV completely."
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