She was wanted for Miss Peru but her father opposed it. Sonia Oquendo and how she gained her independence (and made history in Peru)

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This is not the only happiness in her life these days. Sonia has just celebrated 50 years of marriage with the beloved TV presenter Luis Ángel Pinasco, with whom she forms one of the most stable couples born on the small screen. ‘Rulito’ and Sonia, two institutions, celebrate their golden wedding anniversary simply, surrounded by their loved ones, with an outing to a musical show. Sonia feels like it was yesterday when they were still young and shared a channel and the hosting of a news program on América Televisión, all under the enormous pressure of a press and an audience determined to pair two characters who radiated so much chemistry.

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But the story was not simple. For Pinasco, reaching Oquendo’s heart meant a marathon, a long-distance race. Seven years would pass until she stopped seeing him as a friend and began to feel something more. Sonia insists that the secret to their long-lasting marriage has not been passion, but a pact of independence drawn from the very beginning. “I told Luis Ángel when we started: we will go forward hand in hand, but each in our own way. There is a line: you cannot cross to my side, I cannot cross to yours.” And it has always been that way. That will for independence is better understood when Sonia begins to tell her story.

The girl who played with airplanes

We said that Sonia grew up among airplanes in the jungle of Tingo María because her father, sales manager of the airline Faucett, was transferred there to set up the company’s offices. In those years, her normal life took place between runways and weekend barbecues next to the planes. On weekends, she would get on the empty aircraft with her friends and play with the controls of the twin-engine planes, not knowing that this game would somehow mark her desire to see the world and get lost in it. That taste has not left her: one of her greatest pleasures is still packing her bags and leaving, often alone, faithful to an autonomy she has defended all her life. She has traveled half the world, from the driest deserts to the North Pole itself, where she arrived well protected from the cold, just to watch the northern lights.

Paradoxically, it was that same father linked to aviation who most tried to prevent his daughter from flying on her own. Those were different times and different ways of understanding authority. Sonia felt she wanted to escape. When she became a flight attendant and dreamed of reaching Europe, her father forbade it. “You only do domestic flights and come home to sleep,” he told her. Another clash she remembers was the day some organizers of the Miss Peru contest came to her house to look for her. She had not applied, but apparently her beauty was already legendary on some city beaches. “Someone had taken pictures of me there without knowing it, so they saw them and came to invite me. Honestly, I don’t know how they got my address but I remember very well that my dad kicked them out. He didn’t want to know anything about that. That was the year Frieda Holler won,” she recalls.

That feeling of living under an authoritarian mantle that cut off any possibility of personal fulfillment accompanied her until she was twenty, when a loving advertiser began to insist that she had conditions for show business. Sonia understood that, given the cards she had been dealt, the best way to cut the reins and conquer her freedom was by getting married. “I wanted to act since I was a child. As a young woman, I felt I wanted to conquer the world.” When she finally gathered courage and participated in a contest on América TV to choose a model, she ended up winning. That’s how it started, with small appearances, until months later the production manager called her to his office. “This program is not for you,” he told her, before giving her the real news: “You are going to be the first woman to read the news in this country.” And so it was.

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She stayed in front of the cameras for about twelve years, reading the news, although that meant postponing what she really wanted to do. Sonia had prepared to act, had taken diction classes, but the opportunities did not come. “I remember very well the day Osvaldo Cattone came to look for me to offer me a role in one of his plays. I wanted to faint just by seeing and hearing him there.” The desire was there, but her long hours on the news were an insurmountable barrier. “I can’t raise the curtain if my actors are not there at 7:30 p.m.,” Cattone explained to her. With that, one of her great dreams vanished at the time. Before saying goodbye, however, the theater man left her a promise: “The day will come.”

Adapting to the stage

Sonia’s first marriage did not last long. From those three years, she kept the joy of her first daughter and a sorrow she cried over for an entire weekend. “That was my mourning: I locked myself up to eat cookies with soda, and I cried and cried. But on Monday I said: today I am a new Sonia, here appears a new woman,” she recalls, in an attitude she associates with her zodiac sign — Capricorn, she says, always pushes forward. That same determination marked the next projects of her life: she left the news to dedicate herself to acting, hosted programs like the memorable “Triki Trak,” put together with ‘Rulito’ coffee theater shows so successful they reached the provinces, ventured into soap operas, traveled, went into debt, and finally bought the land where her house now stands. A house that, she admits, now feels a bit big because her daughters no longer live there. “But Luis Ángel doesn’t want to leave. He says: ‘I’m not moving from here, this is my palace.’ And you have to respect that,” adds Sonia.

Sonia Oquendo’s story ends with a detail from “Murder on the Orient Express.” Due to a confusion, she prepared thoroughly for a character that was not hers after all. She even learned to speak with a Hungarian accent. But when she discovered that her role was another, she did not get depressed. She just accepted it. There was no time for panic, only to adapt once again to a new stage, as she has done on stage and in life. “Honestly, I don’t feel what I do is work. It’s a pleasure. It’s my fun.” And about her old desire to conquer the world, she couldn’t be more categorical: “I think I have conquered it. Now I feel like I’m missing the desserts.” //

Also…

The play

“Murder on the Orient Express,” Ken Ludwig’s theatrical adaptation of Agatha Christie’s classic, arrives for the first time in Lima under the direction of Rodrigo Falla. With Carlos Mesta as Poirot and Sonia Oquendo as Princess Dragomiroff, it will have 24 performances, from September 10 to October 31, at the University of Lima. Tickets at Joinnus.

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