Sofia Vergara's real life dramas

Sofia Vergara wants to be clear: she doesn’t want to kill her unborn frozen embryos.

She simply doesn’t want her children to be born.

A child needs parents “that don’t hate each other”, she says bluntly. The world’s highest-paid TV actress and star of long-running hit comedy series Modern Family is caught in a bitter battle with her ex-fiancé over their frozen embryos.

“A kid needs parents,” she says. “I wouldn’t imagine anyone saying that it’s sane to bring into the world kids that are already set up with everything wrong for them. It would be so selfish.”

The 42-year-old Colombian beauty wants her fertilized embryos, created with former lover, entrepreneur Nick Loeb, kept indefinitely on ice.

Especially since she’s preparing to harvest additional eggs in the hope of having children with her new fiancé, True Blood’s chiselled werewolf star Joe Manganiello, 38.

This week they moved into a Los Angeles home together, after less than a year of dating, and two days ago Vergara was awarded her own star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

Both occasions were cause for celebration but have been overshadowed by the legal battle.

And for Vergara, this is just the latest in a lifetime of dramatic twists that would put any daytime soap opera to shame.

One of six children born to a housewife and cattle farmer, raised by nuns in Catholic school, Vergara was discovered by modelling scouts at 17, becoming the teeny-weeny-bikiniclad star of a wildly popular Pepsi commercial.

Yet she quit modelling to marry her childhood sweetheart at 19 and study dentistry, had a son by 20, and by 21 was a divorced single mother.

Desperate, she turned to acting, quickly becoming the host of a hit Latin TV show. But success could not shield her from tragedy.

Her older brother Rafael was gunned down in Colombia in 1998. “We come from a successful family, and he knew he was a target for kidnapping,” she says.

“He always had bodyguards. Then one day he went out alone and was shot dead. I was devastated.”

Only two years later Vergara was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, aged 28.

“I felt totally healthy, and suddenly they tell me I have cancer,” she says.

“I was scared.” She had her thyroid removed, and now has to take a daily pill for the rest of her life, but she survived. “It changes your priorities,” she says.

“It brought me down to earth and to realise the important things.

Also, I started taking more care of my body, to be more healthy.” But she hasn’t always made the best choices.

Vergara was dating Miami mobster Chris Paciello when he was charged with murder.

Vergara offered her Miami home as collateral toward his $15 million bail, and watched him blow her kisses from the dock.

They split when Paciello pleaded guilty, and was jailed in 2000.

She also reportedly had a fling with Colombian drug trafficker Andres López López, who called Vergara “a marvellous woman who I love dearly”.

She brought her younger brother Julio to America, only to see him battle drink and drug addictions that led to 30 arrests over a decade, until his deportation back to Colombia in 2011.

“To see somebody dying over 10 years, little by little, that’s the worst punishment,” she says, but finds the silver lining.

“With so many bad things happening, it creates a tough skin . . . Even when horrible things happen to me, I go on.”

Slogging her way through forgettable films and guest appearances on TV, Vergara dated stars including Tom Cruise and Enrique Iglesias, until finally finding stardom at the advanced age of 37 in Modern Family.

She now heads an empire that earned her £24million last year, with her own lines of perfume, clothing and jewellery.

She runs her own production company, which made her new film, Hot Pursuit, coming to Britain in July, and founded a Latin talent agency which became a marketing and merchandising giant.

And she’s currently the face of Diet Pepsi, CoverGirl, Head & Shoulders and telecom giant AT&T. She’s done it all while mangling English in a thick Latin accent, aided by a body with never-ending curves.

“My boobs are, like, huge,” she says, making oversized hand gestures to represent her 32F bust balanced above a tiny waist.

“My whole life, buying a bra was a nightmare.

“Believe me, I wish I had fake boobs.

I lay down and they completely go down, like all the way. It’s not fun.”

But they have their admirers.

The day Vergara announced her split from Nick Loeb last June, Manganiello contacted a friend begging for her number – though she resisted.

“I had just finished a relationship,” she recalls.

“He seemed like a lot of work because he’s so handsome and younger than me and like, so sexy . . . Just too much!

But he convinced me.”

Sporting the huge square diamond engagement ring he gave her in December – alongside the equally large fake diamond ring from her signature Kmart collection on another finger – she’s now planning their wedding, and another baby.

“My son, Manolo, is 23 years old, which is going to be really weird if I have another baby,” she says.

“But, you know, Joe wants babies and if it’s going to make him super-happy, then . . .”

Her eggs will be harvested, fertilised in vitro, and most likely carried by a surrogate, ensuring that pregnancy will not wreck her voluptuous body or disrupt her career, which she admits came by chance.

“I never wanted to be an actress,” she says.

“I take acting as a gift, because it was nothing that I ever dreamed about growing up.

I never even knew I could be funny or act.

What I really wanted to be was a doctor. I love medicine . . . But you have to study for 10 years.

I knew I couldn’t do that, so I went for the next best thing, dentistry.”

After becoming a huge star in Latin America, she fought to break into American TV but struggled to tame her accent.

“I hired a speech coach and you have to work so much, it’s exhausting,” she says.

“Then when I would go to auditions I was always thinking about pronunciation because you are supposed to put your tongue like this, or like this. So then I would forget to act.

"Then one day I said: ‘That’s it. If I can’t get a job with my accent, then this is not a job for me.’ ”

Her heavy accent ironically became her passport to success in Modern Family, now preparing for its seventh season.

She has been the highest-paid woman in TV for the past three years.

Yet she has remained a loving mother to Manolo, who is studying film at university.

“She had her career and stilaged to raise me at the same time,” he says.

“She’s a Latin mother, which means she’s very loud, and sometimes over-protective.”

It seemed that Vergara had found true love with financier Nick Loeb in 2010, announcing in 2013 that they had harvested her eggs, fertilised them in vitro, and at her insistence intended to hire a surrogate to carry them.

Today, the estranged lovers are poised to face off in court.

Vergara claims they both signed a contract requiring mutual agreement before the embryos – two girls – are implanted, but Loeb insists that he wants to “protect” the embryos and have the children without her.

“A woman is entitled to bring a pregnancy to term even if the man objects,” Loeb argues.

“Shouldn’t a man who is willing to take on all parental responsibilities be similarly entitled to bring his embryos to term even if the woman objects? Keeping them frozen indefinitely is tantamount to killing them.”

Vergara tries not to let the clash mar her joy with Manganiello.

“We try not to even talk about it,” she says. “We have lawyers, and we’re having so much fun right now. We’re settling into our new house and we’re planning our wedding.

“I’m super-happy. I have to enjoy Sofia Vergara has found fame and true love after leaving Colombia, where her brother was gunned down in 1998 what I’m living right now.”