Sonia Martinez

Sonia Martínez (Madrid, September 23, 1963 - September 4, 1994) was a Spanish actress and TV introducer, known by her role in the Spanish version of American educational TV broadcast 3-2-1 Contact aimed to spread Science through 12- to 14-year-old audiences. After this children-oriented TV career, Sonia also played some characters in films of the mid-1980s period, but was mainly known for being one of the earlier Spanish famous people to die as a victim of AIDS, as Rock Hudson was in the Anglo-speaking countries.

Sonia became a TV introducer after successful years as a teenage swimmer, winning a second prize in the championship of Castile, the central tableland region of Spain. Her sister, Irene Martinez, was also a shining sportswoman, participating in 1980 and 1984 editions of the Summer Olympic Games as a gymnast. Sonia worked in 3-2-1 Contact from 1982 to 1983, when Spanish airings of the program ceased (Televisión Española, or TVE, the state-owned network, was then the only authorised TV broadcaster). Sonia worked from 1983 to 1984 for her second TVE show, called "Dabadabadá", another children-oriented broadcast.

After these shows, Sonia Martinez started a new period, looking for more mature audiences as a cinema actress. She played some characters in films like Gonzalo Suárez´s "Epílogo". But her career was put an end in 1986, when Sonia was in Ibiza filming an episode of the German TV series Großstadtrevier, in what she played the role of a police woman. During a break in the filming days a photographer took -without her permission- some images of a semi-nude Sonia, images that were published in the gossip magazine Interviu. As a result of the photos, Sonia was dismissed from TVE, where she was presenting "En la naturaleza", an environmental-themed broadcast. Despite a successful attempt to recover her place in the TVE staff by the courts, Sonia's projected reentré in "La Bola de Cristal" show (a pop-music and semi-underground broadcast linked to the Movida madrileña) was truncated when "La Bola de Cristal" itself was eliminated of the TVE airing schedules in 1988.

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