Dimples Romana: Either you hate her or you love her

You loved to hate her in Tabing Ilog. Then, in a sudden change of heart, you learned to love her in Kay Tagal Kang Hinintay. Why the 180-degree turnaround?

Maybe it’s because Dimples Romana has so mastered the art of playing villain and good girl, you get carried away with each twitch of her eyebrow, each flicker of her eyelashes. And this is why, after some of her contemporaries in Talent Center’s Star Circle Batch 4 have long faded away, the 5’8" Dimples is still around.

Despite marriage (to Boyet Ahmee, an engineer connected with Intel) and a four-month-old daughter, Kristiana, Dimples is still doing what she loves most: acting. She plays Aga Muhlach’s caretaker (Sam, Aga’s character, is a heart patient) in All My Life, Star Cinema’s 11th anniversary offering. As caretaker, Dimples is patience personified–a good girl, in other words.

Which is what she is in real life.

When the Philippine Star’s Damayan helped her late sister who was then suffering from leukemia, Dimples and her mother personally thanked this paper’s president and CEO, Miguel Belmonte.

Dimples and her husband are obviously still in the honeymoon stage. She doesn’t mind waking up in the small hours of the morning to drive her husband from their house in Parañaque to his office in Tagaytay. She does this without fail, even if she came from a late-night shooting or taping the previous day.

Besides, the one-and-a-half-hour drive is doing wonders for her. "It clears my mind and helps me plan for the day," says Dimples. A day for her at home means cooking kare kare, sinigang or adobo for her family. They have a cook, yes, but Dimples doesn’t always rely on her, not when her husband can tell if the sinigang is his wife’s labor of love or not.

"Thankfully, my mom, a Kapampangan, taught me how to cook, even if she had to give instructions over the phone," Dimples happily reports.

Life, she adds, has been good to her, and she has no regrets giving up dreams of becoming a beauty queen.

Besides, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

"You have to sacrifice something in exchange for doing something you really love," Dimples says with a shrug.

People in ABS-CBN are encouraging her to join Mrs. Philippines. But that’s not on Dimples’ list of priorities so far.

Keeping her home happy for her family is. So is curling up with a favorite book at home.

"That’s one of the differences between my husband and me," says Dimples, who carried a paperback copy of Shopaholic at the presscon.

"He watches TV while I read a book. But he lets me be. My reading fare consists of inspirational books like those of Mitch Albom," states Dimples.

The age gap between her and her husband (he is nine years her senior) doesn’t bother her at all.

"My husband has met director Lauren (Laurenti) Dyogi (who also directs All My Life). I got married and conceived my baby while we were working on Kay Tagal (which Dyogi directed). I even told Direk I was pregnant on the last three or four shooting days of the soap," recalls Dimples.

She may not be doing movies that frequently, but when she does, her directors (like Joey Javier Reyes in Minsan May Isang Puso and Chito Roño in Dekada) invariably give her meaty roles she can sink her teeth into.

No wonder Dimples can’t ask for more.