Anjo Mau (English: Evil Angel) is a remake of the original 1976 Brazilian telenovela that was produced and broadcast by TV Globo between September 8, 1997, and March 27, 1998. It was produced in 173 chapters.
Nice is a poor young woman with an angelic face but far from angelic actions. She refuses to accept a predictable fate: marrying her boyfriend from the suburbs and having lots of children. She takes a job as a nanny in the Medeiros family mansion, where her father, Augusto, already works as a chauffeur. There, she falls in love with Rodrigo, the brother of her employer, Stela. The nanny uses every trick in the book to win him over, dreaming of the day she will become the lady of that grand house.
Nice takes advantage of what she learns in the mansion to stir up conflict and get closer to Rodrigo. He is about to marry Paula when, thanks to a scheme orchestrated by the nanny, he discovers that his fiancée is cheating on him with his own brother, the playboy Ricardo. Disillusioned by the betrayal and determined to defy his family and the arrogance of the high society around him, Rodrigo begins appearing at nightclubs with Nice at his side.
But the path is still not fully open for the nanny. Rodrigo becomes enchanted by the sweet Lígia, who is in love with him, and Nice uses her own brother, Luís Carlos, to come between the two. While fighting to win Rodrigo’s heart in the Medeiros mansion, Nice lives a nightmare at home. She is the adopted daughter of Augusto and Alzira. Her father treats her with affection, but Alzira harbours a strange disdain for her and hides a secret from the past.
Other storylines weave together the lives of the rich and the poor. Racial prejudice has driven a wedge between the simple Cida and her daughter Tereza, as well as her grandchildren. Now a high-society woman, Tereza is married to the millionaire Rui Novaes, and the couple has two children: Paula and Bruno. To her family, Tereza has claimed that her mother is dead, afraid they will discover she is part-Black. But when Bruno begins dating Vívian, Cida’s adopted daughter, Tereza is forced to confront the past she tried to bury.
The decline of the traditional São Paulo aristocracy—descendants of the earliest settlers—is also explored through the sisters Clotilde and Elisinha Jordão Ferraz, who try to conceal their ruin by keeping up appearances and swindling others. They join forces with the seamstress Goretti, who struggles to raise her daughter Simone. In the past, Goretti was abandoned by the man who got her pregnant. That man is Tadeu, now married to Stela Medeiros, and consumed by guilt, he tries to reconnect with the daughter he once rejected.
