When making a telenovela, there are plenty of things to consider: your protagonists, your villains, your story, and the length of the production. Milagros passes the villains and story categories with flying colors, but it's the protagonists and length of the this telenovela that should've been more carefully handled. Milagros stars USA-born Sonya Smith in the lead role, an actress who is very beautiful and fits the image of the character perfectly, but doesn't convince very well with her acting this time around: but who can blame her? It isn't very easy to pull off acting like a naive and extremely religious woman born and raised by nuns in a convent. On the other hand, Mexican Roberto Mateos was probably the worst casting choice this telenovela made in the lead role of Jose Antonio, a character who witnesses the massacre of his entire family at just 10 years old and returns to get revenge on the family responsible (Milagros' family, of course.) Jose Antonio is a role that needs a lot of emotion, and Roberto Mateos just doesn't have any. He seems to constantly force out his phrases as if he doesn't need to impress anyone being a main character, and usually looks small next to actresses like Yvonne Frayssinet in the most dramatic scenes. And speaking of Frayssinet, she is one of the compensating actresses who fill the void for Smith and Mateos, along with Karina Calmet. Yvonne Frayssinet is impeccable as Lucrecia De La Torre, perhaps one of the cruelest villains a telenovela has ever seen; and her daughter Fernanda, played incredibly well by new-comer Karina Calmet, mixes sarcasm with sassiness to form an irresistible antagonist. Needless to say, both Frayssinet and Calmet won awards for their performances in Milagros -- Frayssinet for Best Actress, and Calmet for Revelation of 2000. Other actors worth watching include Reynaldo Arenas, Mari Pili Barreda, Alberto Isola, Virna Flores and Tatiana Astengo. Milagros would've been more entertaining if the number of episodes hadn't been so unnecessarily high -- 220 episodes, most of which feature unbearable scenes of the male lead in a relationship with his secretary (played by Jimena Lindo), and made viewers forget that Milagros & Jose Antonio were in fact the lead couple. Hopefully in the future, América Producciones (the production house of this telenovela) will learn that even though casting the two lead roles does require the actors to be visually appealing, but it also requires for them to have acting ability. Milagros wasn't the first or last novela that made this grave mistake..
