UTF-8 and capitalize issues

Hi everyone, I'm applying the capitalize modifier to a particular text variable, which works as expected in most cases. What has recently come up is that non-english characters are throwing a bit of a kink into my plan. For example, Galápagos is coming out as GaláPagos with the capitalize modifier. I looked through the forums and didn't find any solutions that worked, including using the setlocale() PHP function on my page... All my Smarty template pages are set to charset=utf-8 in the headers, and my mysql tables and text fields are utf8_general_ci. So at this point I'm at a bit of a loss as to what I should do next. Any ideas? Thanks! Cameron