Sophia’s LA Story

It has been a year since Sophia Latjuba left Jakarta and relocated to Los Angeles. From her new home in the rolling hills outside the Californian metropolis, Sophia tells of starting over. Bruce Emond reports.

Only a month into her family’s move to Los Angeles, in January 2009, Sophia Latjuba said it was too early to tell if she was loving or hating her new home, but it was “definitely a positive feeling”.

Today, looking back on the year, she describes it as “one of tears and laughter”. The tears included the loss of her father, to whom she was extremely close. She has also had to adjust to finding new friends and dipping her feet into the competitive LA showbiz world.

The pluses have been seeing the adjustment of her two children, teenager Eva Celia and Manuella, 4, her daughter with Michael Villareal, her American second husband. And she has found the quality of life that was missing in hectic Jakarta and she confessed she feared would “ruin me as a wife, a mother, a daughter” if she stayed.

Most days in her new home, she says, follow a pleasant pattern of domesticity. Without the household help of her Jakarta home, she jokes, there is never a boring moment.

“I wake up, make breakfast, Michael takes the kids to school. Then I do the laundry, clean the rooms, you know the drill. I love it though.”

It’s not all a life of domestic diva-hood for Sophia, one of the most iconic faces of the 1990s, a model and sometime actress whose gorgeous, slightly aloof and intimidating Eurasian looks made her many an Indonesian man’s fantasy woman (she would still stand out today in the local entertainment scene, now full of pale-skinned models and actresses of the winsome candy-box cover variety).

At the age of 39 and a 20-year veteran of the industry, she is going on auditions again, recently signing up with an agent and getting headshots done. She says it is at once an exciting and humbling experience to deal with the competition.

“Everything in the business is different here,” says Sophia, who was the longtime spokeswoman for cosmetic products as well as a major South Jakarta mall. “For example, if someone wants you for a commercial, they have their criteria already, and no matter how pretty or skinny you are, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t match their criteria of what they’re looking for…”

And the looks that opened so many doors in Indonesia are not everything in Los Angeles, where it’s the whole package – attractiveness, talent, professionalism – that separates the stars from the starlets. Sophia is taking acting and scene study classes, another humbling experience, she adds.

“I’m very proud to be one of the very few in Indonesia who is willing to step out of my ‘spoiled diva zone’,” she says. “I know I’m nothing compared to when I was in Indonesia, but I’m willing to face the challenge.”

Although she has yet to get her Screen Actors Guild membership, and so can only do non-union work, she has already landed a commercial for a major automobile company. But she has a dry sense of humor, including about herself, that may even surprise her detractors who see her as no more than a very pretty face.

“Maybe it’ll be an eye-opener that all these years I wasn’t actually very good at what I was doing,” she adds with a laugh.

Self-deprecating comments aside – always a good quality in the enviously good-looking to appease all the green-eyed monsters – Sophia is a proud woman. She has withstood flak for making controversial professional and personal choices back in her homeland. These included being at the center of a scandal over suggestive swimsuit photos in a major men’s magazine in the mid-1990s, and the gossip-mill frenzy concerning her marriage to Villareal and his divorce from his first wife.

She is also not one to suffer fools gladly – the first time I interviewed her 10 years ago for a Q&A, she said she couldn’t stand people who were sluggish – and also too proud and wary to give too much of herself. “I would never show weakness in public by crying,” she told me in 2008.

But she is still as open as she can be in discussing her father’s death. Although born and raised in her Austrian-German mother’s German homeland, she spent her youth with her father in Indonesia. She has described him in the past as being disciplined, concerned and loving, and so his death from lung cancer shortly after the family moved to Los Angeles, when she was also dealing with the adjustment to a new home, hit her hard.

“I catch myself grieving every day,” she says. “When you lose a loved one, in this case my father who I was very close to, the most important thing is to be surrounded by your family and friends; the people who knew him. Here, I only had Michael and Eva. The comfort wasn’t enough. Plus, I couldn’t be there for my mother, my brother, my grandmother, etc. It’s a burden I will always carry.”

Maybe, she ventures, there was another, deeper reason behind her absence from Indonesia when he passed, and here she can find some solace.

“Since I was the closest to my Dad, perhaps he didn’t want me there to see him surrendering. It was me who always reminded him to keep on fighting. And he did, for me only. I forgot that it was about him. My love for him was too selfish. I was too scared of losing him.”

She says the most difficult adjustment to living in the United States is figuring out how people “work … I made some new friends, but their meaning of friendship is very different from what I’m used to. People here aren’t as spontaneous as Indonesians.”

Her children are adjusting well. Eva, who was an upcoming teen soap star back in Indonesia, made the honor roll in her public high school with a GPA of 4.0, after initially missing her friends back home. Manuella is in her element, lapping up visits to parks, mountains and beaches where she is free to be a kid.

Even with the difficult adjustments, Sophia says she doesn’t regret the decision to relocate. The opportunities for the children are huge; Eva will probably follow in her father’s footsteps studying vocals and the music business (Sophia also had a few albums in the early 1990s), although she recently told her mother she was mulling studying mathematics as a backup plan.

“Even though I’m certain she’ll succeed as a mathematician, I told her to get rid of that Indonesian mindset that says music is a ‘no-future’ business. She has the talent and the drive, and the US is the place to be. Plus this place will teach my kids that hard work and determination are required in life. Back in Jakarta they probably would’ve been spoiled, being my daughters. It won’t be easy, but if you make it, this place will know how to appreciate your work and talents.”

Sophia has been keeping up with friends through Twitter, and she plans to come back to Jakarta this year, the first time since she left. When she left, she had cited rising intolerance as one of her concerns, “all these stupid rules Indonesia is coming up with on a daily basis … I refuse to live a restricted life like that.”

Seeing her homeland from a distance, and also living in another society, has softened her perspective.

“Of course those concerns are getting less and less [pressing], mainly because I don’t live there anymore. Occasionally I read people’s frustrations about Jakarta; one of them is a government that’s becoming less tolerant. But ever since I’ve lived here I’ve come to realize that no country or society is perfect. Each is unique, one is sometimes more livable than another, but definitely not perfect.”

She was noncommittal when I asked her 15 months ago whether she would ever return to Indonesia, and she remains so today. Perhaps, perhaps not.

“That’s a good question. I will return, perhaps for some work or a visit. But returning for good? That’s all still written in the stars.”

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