Endemol Shine North America and Major TV to adapt Celia Cruz’s autobiography into TV series

Endemol Shine North America and Major TV have optioned the rights to late Latin superstar Celia Cruz’s best-selling autobiography, Celia: My Life, with plans to adapt it for a scripted television series.

Veteran film and TV producer/director/choreographer Kenny Ortega (High School Musical) is signed on to serve as an executive producer and direct the series. Flavio Morales, EVP, Endemol Shine Latino, U.S. Initiatives, is also set to serve as an EP.

Endemol Shine and Major TV are currently developing an English language series based on Cruz’s only authorized autobiography, with a foreword by the late Maya Angelou. Based on more than 500 hours of taped interviews by the Smithsonian, recorded just months before her passing, Cruz let fans glimpse a life that, while living in the full view of the public, had remained largely private.

“There is no bigger name in Latin music than Celia Cruz. We are thrilled to be adapting her amazing life story, one filled with triumph and tragedy, for a dramatic television series with a producer of Kenny Ortega’s pedigree attached,” says Endemol Shine North America CEO Cris Abrego.

Endemol Shine and Major TV previously announced that they had jointly optioned the rights to Chris Perez’s To Selena With Love, the best-selling book that tells the late Latin superstar Selena Quintanilla-Perez’s love story through the eyes of her husband.