NEWSFLASH

IS DIANA LIVING UP TO THE ZUBIRI NAME?

Manila, November 14, 2002 (STAR) By Butch Francisco - Zubiri. The surname smacks of southern gentry. Pineapple royalty. Rep. Miguel Zubiri, Socialite Stephanie Zubiri, Seiko star Diana Zubiri.

When she was being introduced in the movies last summer, Diana Zubiri’s drumbeaters insisted she is a true-blue Zubiri. But in this industry of make believe, screen nymphers in the past had assumed the names of Brandy Ayala, Maita Soriano, Claudia Zobel, Cherry Madrigal and Glenda Araneta.

In the case of Diana, at least she and the Bukidon congressman know each other personally. They appeared together as guest performers in an episode of Whattamen, where they played brother and sister.

After that brief guest stint together, Diana felt close enough to ask the congressman if he could escort her to the Star Awards for TV last month. Rep. Zubiri initially said yes – only to back out of the commitment due to a pressing engagement.

Miffed, Diana doesn’t even want to talk about the Zubiris anymore. In the first place, hitching her star onto an old and prominent family name didn’t give the boost needed for her career then. Quite unexpectedly, it was through a piece of modernity – a modern infrastructure called the flyover – that made her a household name all throughout the long weekend of All Saints’ Day.

Yes, in spite of that grave scandal case filed against her by Mandaluyong City Mayor Benhur Abalos, Diana will be the first to admit the FHM pictorial did a lot more good than bad to her career. Thanks to that highly-publicized magazine pictorial, she’s no longer lagging behind her counterparts in the business – Maui Taylor of Viva and Aubrey Miles of Regal – at least in terms of popularity.

Although she worries about the lawsuit, Diana is confident she will not go to jail for that (it’s going to be imprisonment for her – minimum of one month and one day and maximum of six months in case she loses the cases). "Wala naman talaga akong ginawang masama, ah!" she protests in a rather childlike manner.

Athough she turned 19 last April, Diana is really just a wisp of a girl who stands only 5’4." She weighs 110 lbs. and measures 34-26-35. Pretty even without the aid of cosmetics, Diana is really more morena than mestiza (definitely not the sharp Castilian features of the Zubiris of the south).

The middle child in a brood of three girls, Diana admits she has never known her father and now looks up to a stepfather as the man of their house. Although she wasn’t really raised in the lap of luxury, Diana doesn’t remember a time in her life when she and her siblings went hungry. Her stepfather, to begin with, has always been a responsible and practical man who hawked fish by the bulk in the seashores of Manila Bay. The family also had a sari-sari store that regularly helped put food on the table.

In her mid-teens, however, the family businesses went bad and Diana, being a responsible child, thought she could get the family out of their financial woes by becoming a movie star.

From Viva, where she got a rejection slip, she auditioned several times for the different batches of the Star Circle group of ABS-CBN. Along with some friends from school, she would fall in line outside the ABS-CBN building after lunch (which is when the gates are opened) and would wait for her turn until evening – only to be told to return the following day. But after being tested for video, she never heard from the network people again.

She remembers auditioning along with Alessandra de Rossi who eventually became part of Star Circle Batch 6 and, later, Heart Evangelista, who joined Batch 9.

One time, she was just a door away from Johnny Manahan when she was told by Channel 2 executive David Fabros to have her retainers removed, which she flatly refused – having spent a fortune on it.

Ironically enough, her crack at stardom happened when she was just sitting out there in school – at the Informatics in SM Fairview where she was taking up computer lessons. Jimmy Mercado (stepfather of Romnick Sarmenta) – so it turned out – had been commissioned by Seiko Films to look for an ingénue. Jimmy thought Diana was perfect as the female lead of what Robbie Tan felt was already a quality picture by Seiko standards – a movie entitled Itlog. But true to its title, Itlog laid a big fat egg at the box office.

Diana’s next movie, Bakat, did better at the tills. The film had Lualhati Bautista as screenwriter.

Now that she is starting to earn relatively well, Diana is bent on making life a lot more comfortable for her family. No, they don’t need to be as rich as the Zubiris of Bukidnon. All they want is a little more comfort.

The family sari-sari store is back in business – though in a different location – and Diana has recently bought for her stepfather a car that he converted into a taxi.

Since the taxi now plies the streets of the metropolis, Diana sometimes has to take the jeepney to her shootings. When she was in the middle of filming Kasiping – her third movie –Diana had to take a jeep from her house in Fairview all the way to the location site at the Triumph Building along Quezon Avenue.

At home, she’s still required to make her own bed and occasionally does the dishes. She’s also a wiz at the kitchen where she whips up her favorite adobong kangkong and sinigang na hipon with plenty of kangkong. Too bad, she wasn’t discovered early enough to have starred in Seiko’s 2000 production of its other prestigious film, Kangkong.

At the moment, Diana is still hoping to buy a car for herself. No, she swears she won’t be lured into the business of making quick money – if you know what I mean.

Not so long ago, a businessman offered to pay her to pose for a calendar to the tune of P100,000 – but on the condition that they would also have a private pictorial between them (again, if you know what I mean).

Diana has received other similar offers and her answer had always been the same: NO.

No, she’s not willing to sacfice her reputation – not for P100,000, not for all the money in the world. After all, she has Zubiri name to protect, doesn’t she?