Marlene Forte, the Cuban-born, Union City-raised actress who plays Carmen Ramos, the Ewing family’s longtime superintendent, on TNT’s Dallas, was busy watching World Cup soccer when an interviewer called her recently at her Los Angeles home.
“It’s okay,” she said of the interruption. “I’m recording. I’ll watch it later.”
Forte, 53, knows her way around recording devices. Before she decided to become an actress at the unfashionable age of 30, the then-single mother opened a store, Archway Video, in North Bergen. Her inventory of VHS movies became “an intense education in film.” By the time Blockbuster took over Archway in 1986, Forte had enrolled in film school in Manhattan. From there, she joined the Labyrinth Theater Company, also in Manhattan, where she shadowed actors including Philip Seymour Hoffman and Sam Rockwell.
By the 1990s, Spanish TV commercials were on her resume, followed by bit parts in movies and on TV (ER, Real Women Have Curves).
Forte, whose parents “moved on up the Hudson River” from Union City to Guttenberg to Edgewater as her childhood progressed, eventually moved on up herself, to her recurring role on Dallas. She joined the cast in 2011; the second half of the third season starts August 18.
Carmen—whom “J.R. took under his wing out of the goodness in his heart,” Forte says—is featured prominently this season. “She gets a little lost. She has a lot of doubt, she loses her faith. You’re going to see a big change in her,” Forte says. “It’s classic Dallas: a big ol’ mess.”