New Delhi, March 15 -- Hollywood actors might rule the silver screen - as Sunday's Academy Awards are poised to prove - but Brazil's path to stardom often starts under the bright lights of a TV studio rather than a sprawling movie set.

Since at least the 1960s, the telenovelas, Latin American TV series often compared to soap operas, produced by Brazil's leading broadcaster TV Globo have evolved from simple daily dramas into a multi-million-dollar industry with 13 studios, three set towns, 122 edit bays and reaching up to 60 million of Brazil's 213 million people every week.

Many Brazilian actors associated with Oscar-contending films - such as "Central Station" (1998), "I'm Still Here" (2024) and this year's four-category nominee "The S...