María Cecilia Suárez de Garay, known professionally as Cecilia Suárez (Mexican ; born November 22, 1971), is a Mexican actress and a prominent activist working with the United Nations and European Union campaigning against femicide and violence against women. She has starred in film, television, and theater across the United States, Mexico, and Spain. She has had popular and award-winning roles in works including Sex, Shame and Tears, Capadocia, Nos vemos, papá, and The House of Flowers. She has been honored with three lifetime achievement awards; she was the first woman to receive Mexico's lifetime achievement award in cinema. She was also the first Spanish-speaking actress to be nominated for an Emmy. Beyond campaigning against femicide, Suárez is also an activist for human rights and women's rights in Mexico and in Mexican media. Ignacio Sánchez Prado, an historian of Mexican cinema, writes that she has an "iconic status as an actress in Mexico's most successful movies".:152 Early life Suárez was born and raised in Tampico, a small coastal area in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas. She says that there was no theater there, and that her parents shielded her from too much play-acting as a child because "childhood was something to prolong and respect". She has three sisters, including the director Mafer Suárez; her father was Engino "Ben" and her mother is Ma̰ Elena. Suárez also has family from Asturias, Spain, and holds Spanish dual nationality from her grandfather, an Asturian who emigrated to Mexico. Career Suárez has said she never dreamed of being an actor. She moved to the United States in 1991 for university, attending Illinois State University; having intended to study law, she instead moved into theater, inspired by her older sister Mafer. She graduated as valedictorian of the theater program in 1995, receiving the Jean Scharfenberg Scholarship. As she left college, she also received the Steppenwolf Theatre Acting Fellowship Award, and her debut was at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre. With ties to the city, she is still a member of the Chicago-based Theater with a View/Teatro Vista group. While in Illinois, Suárez performed the lead role in several classical plays, and took part in the Illinois Shakespeare Festival. In the late 1990s she starred in Sex, Shame and Tears, the second film of the Nuevo Cine Mexicano, which was "her first triumph". When asked about her experience making Sex, Shame and Tears, she responded that she