It is based on ("Slave Isaura"), a
Brazilian Romance Novel written by
Bernardo Guimarães and first published in
1875 by Casa Garnier publishers, in
Rio De Janeiro . With this novel, Bernardo Guimarães got very famous all over the country. He was even appreciated by Brazil's last Emperor
Dom Pedro II .
Isaura, a squint-eyed white
Slave girl endured hard times before she was freed and finally married her star-crossed lover, Alvaro. Meanwhile she suffered a lot at the hands of Leôncio Almeida, the landlord of a big plantation farm and main antagonist in the plot, who wanted to make her a
Concubine . She even became briefly enamoured to the humpback dwarf Melchior and almost married him to avoid
Prostitution .
The novel was made into an extremaly popular
Telenovela on the late
1970s by
Rede Globo . The public offenly reffered to the show as ''Isaura, the white slave girl''. It was over 200 episodes long. Isaura was played by
Lucélia Santos , on the high point of her career.
The series's emotional story created an incredibly loyal audience all around the world, e.g. in
South America ,
Eastern Europe and
China . It was the first Television series allowed to air in China with a foreign actress playing the main character. In
Hungary , TV subscribers allegedly spontaneously collected app. 75,000 USD worth of money and sent it to the Brazilian embassy to buy Isaura's freedom. In
1988 -
1989 the soap opera was shown in the
Soviet Union under the title ''Рабыня Изаура'' (
English : ''The Slave Isaura''). Released under the title of ''"A slave's fortune"''.
In
2004 , another Brazilian television network,
Rede Record , made a new adaptation of Bernardo Guimarães' novel.
Rede Record ranked second throughout the whole 6 months this telenovela aired, which was something really new in Brazil, since only Globo is known to have successful telenovelas.
