Asia Vieira (full name Asia Molly Vieira) — is a Canadian actress of Portuguese origin, who is best known among filmmakers for the fact that at the age of nine she played the title role of a girl named Delia York in the Canadian-American television horror film The Omen IV: The Awakening, which ultimately served as the main source of inspiration for writing the work Always Visible (Another Prayer for the Dying Horror Genre), which was dedicated directly to Asia Vieira herself.
Biography
Becoming
Birth
Asia Molly Vieira (hereinafter simply Asia Vieira) was born on May 18, 1982 in Toronto, Ontario. It is incredibly difficult to find information about her family from independent sources, but according to Spanish Wikipedia, she is of Portuguese descent. However, this is easy to understand if you look at her last name – Vieira is a word of Galician origin, which is used to call scallops in Galicia and Portugal.
Childhood
Since childhood, Asia Vieira has shown an interest in such things as sports – as the IMDB website states, the actress’s favorite activity was gymnastics, including figure skating, swimming, skiing and, interestingly, horse riding – we focus on this for the simple reason that in the film Omen IV: The Awakening there is a scene where the heroine, played by Asia Vieira, rides a horse, which, we are sure, was the initiative of either the actress herself or her parents.
In addition to sports, Asia Vieira was distinguished by her love of art, which certainly influenced her future career. According to materials from the same IMDB site, the actress had good fame in her school due to the fact that during singing lessons she showed teachers and classmates her outstanding abilities in the school choir. In addition to her vocal talents, Asia Vieira showed amazing results in dancing – the raging actress gave special preference to the so-called “jazz dancing” (perhaps this term needs clarification, but most likely we are talking about dancing to the accompaniment of jazz music). In addition, Asia Vieira showed herself well in such a field of performing arts as ballet.
First steps in art
Children’s model
According to IMDB, in 1986, when Asia Vieira was four years old, her parents, likely inspired by their daughter’s success in gymnastics, decided to send her into the child modeling business (meaning when a small child stars in commercials). Unfortunately, it is difficult to find evidence of this fact on the Internet – that is, scans of magazines containing her photographs, but we have to take this at its word in the absence of other information.
Debut in cinema
Of course, the fact that Asia Vieira appeared in a commercial could not escape the attention of people working in the film business, and so two years later, when Asia was six years old, an American director named Leonard Simon Nimoy (known, among other things, role of Spock in the cult TV series Star Trek) invited the girl to a screen test and eventually approved her for the role of a girl named Molly in his film The Good Mother. The young actress’s partners were such famous actors as Diane Keaton and Liam Neeson.
Career as a child actress and filming in Omen IV: Awakening
Having made her debut in this way, Asia Vieira proved to the whole world that she is a good child actress, which is why she was invited to star in various films and television series, a list of which you can find on Wikipedia or on IMDB. We’ll take a closer look at the role of Asia Vieira in the film Omen IV: Awakening.
By 1991, Asia was already 9 years old, and before that she had already managed to star (in addition to the aforementioned film The Good Mother) in three television series – The Kissing Place, Street Legal and E.N.G. Obviously, the actress’s successes did not pass by the film bosses of 20th Century Studios (then 20th Century Fox). Then there was such a situation that Harvey Bernhard, the producer of the famous film The Omen, wanted to quickly warm up his hands by shooting some cheap film that would be released under a brand that was already familiar to viewers. As a result, this man decided to film not in America, but in Canada, because doing these things there is much cheaper than in the states themselves. Harvey Bernhard assembled a film crew in Vancouver, inviting there, as you understand, those actors who lived in Canada itself. Harvey Bernhard cast Asia Vieira to play the character, who would be the so-called “female version” of Damien Thorne, because we think the Canadian filmmakers themselves recommended him a girl who had a good reputation among child actors in Canada.
Later life
Higher education
Asia Vieira later went to study at the Etobicoke School of the Arts, because she, as a person who had found herself in the career of an actress, was certainly drawn to continue this in the future. Asia Vieira graduated from the above-mentioned educational institution as a major in musical theater.
In addition, Asia Vieira entered higher education, namely the University of Toronto, where she studied drama and history.
Further career as an actress
Obviously, a child actress could not always have such a role – after all, people tend to grow, and therefore it was obvious that in the future Asia Vieira had to be content with roles in cheap productions that were not in demand among the audience. It is not known for certain why Asia was not taken into the so-called “big cinema”, but probably the whole point rested on the fact that she did not want to move to live closer to Hollywood, being content with her native Canada. As a result, the most famous role of the already adult Asia Vieira is the film adaptation of the LGBT novel by Michael Cunningham called A Home at the End of the World. The film based on this book, which was released in 2005, was not particularly popular (probably due to its subject matter), and therefore few people paid attention to the actress – especially since Asia Vieira was cast in a supporting role rather than the title role.
Leaving cinema
Again, it is not known for certain why Asia Vieira did not make it to the big screen, but as a result, she decided to move to another field of art – namely, she began working on the radio and participating in dubbing for animated films. However, before that, in 2006, she managed to star in the short film I Am an Apartment Building, which won at the Canadian Short Film Festival in Edmont.