Portuguese transsexual wins U.K. <i>Big Brother</I> (13354)

Portuguese transsexual Nadia Almada won the latest edition of the United Kingdom's Big Brother game show with 74% of the public vote, reports BBC News. The audience for the season finale of the popular series averaged about 8.3 million, with more than 9 million--more than half of the entire U.K. TV audience--tuned in by the end of the episode.

"There's no words that could show the happiness inside me," said Almada, 27, upon leaving the Big Brother house. "Thank you so much." Almada, one of the most popular contestants in the show's five-year history, didn't reveal to housemates right away that she had been born a man. "It was very hard because there were times I felt I had to lie a little bit, and I didn't want to lie at all," she said, noting that she didn't want to treat her transsexuality as a secret but instead wanted to win the show without telling her fellow contestants as "a reassurance of myself." Almada, who began the series as a 50-1 long shot to win, takes home a cash prize of approximately $117,000.