Laura Valenzuela, actress and television presenter, has died this Friday at the age of 92, as confirmed by RTVE. The model was also admitted to the La Princesa hospital in Madrid for a few days. Her health has progressively worsened during her stay in the hospital premises.
Lara Dibildos, actress and daughter of Valenzuela, has been in charge of updating her mother’s status. Just a few days ago he spoke publicly about her, in the Telecinco Fiesta program. At that time, Laura Valenzuela had just spent a few days in another hospital due to an infection, although she was already “fine” and “at home” according to Dibildos.
Laura Valenzuela was one of the pioneers of television in Spain. In fact, she became the first presenter that the medium had in 1956, when TVE began broadcasting regularly from Madrid’s Paseo de la Habana. There, she formed a professional couple with some well-known presenters, such as Joaquín Prat.
As her daughter recounted in the La 1 program, Blood Ties, it was the well-known actor José Luis Ozores who proposed that she be one of the first faces to appear on television when it was barely known about it in Spain. One of Valenzuela’s main challenges on TVE was to present the Eurovision Song Contest in 1969 from Madrid, after Massiel’s victory the previous year, and which resulted in a four-way tie between the host country, France, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
She married the film producer José Luis Dibildos in 1971, although they had been together for 13 years until then. That same year, her only daughter, Lara Dibildos, was born, who has followed her mother’s footsteps professionally and is also dedicated to acting and participating in television programs.
This turn in her personal life led Laura Valenzuela to have a professional break of almost 20 years. It was in 1990 when she was entrusted with being, once again, a pioneer in another newly created television channel at that time: Telecinco. She presented a multitude of programs there in the early years of the network, although her first project was the Tele 5 magazine, tell me? together with Paloma Lago and Javier Basilio, among others.
Some of his latest television projects include a morning show on TVE’s La 1, Mañanas de primera, which he presented for a few months in 1996 and in which his daughter Lara Dibildos also collaborated. However, her appearances began to be less and less, and for some years, Valenzuela has been completely removed from the cameras, except at very specific moments.
In her facet as an actress, Laura Valenzuela made her debut on the big screen in 1954, two years before making it on television. Some of the most outstanding films in which she participated were El pescador de coplas, El inquisitor or La violetera.
