Spanish-language network Telemundo has teamed up with Miami Dade College to teach prospective telenovela actors how to look good in a skimpy maid’s uniform while shedding a single tear for the reclusive, ranch-owning employer they love:

The acting workshop, a partnership between Telemundo and Miami Dade College, is central to Telemundo’s business strategy of developing original programming in the form of soap operas to fill evening prime-time hours on 15 Telemundo stations and one independent station. The network footed the bill for the acting workshop.

Telemundo lacks the nearly automatic access to the highly popular soap operas, or telenovelas, churned out by Mexico’s Grupo Televisa that are the mainstay at rival Univisión Communications, the dominant force in U.S. Hispanic television. So Hialeah-based Telemundo has set out to fill its time slots with its own productions.

But the course seeks not only to make sure you know how to work your best angles in front of a Vaseline-smeared camera lens. It only wants to make you a getter person, says professor and actress Adriana Barraza:

The 300 hours of acting, movement and speech classes — crammed into three months — ”are going to help you be better human beings,” Barraza said Tuesday evening at the class graduation ceremony. “Being better human beings, believe me, will help you become better actors.”

Also useful is learning how to slap a ho down.

Telemundo grooms its own soap stars [The Miami Herald]