Although the news transpired until yesterday afternoon, the actress Agatha Lys, born Margarita García San Segundo in Valladolid 68 years ago, died in Benalmádena (Málaga) on November 12, when she was still 67 years old. His widowhood situation and the fact that he did not have descendants or a close relationship with any member of his family, together with a voluntary withdrawal of the methatic eye undertaken more than a decade ago, has meant that the time of silence around his death has been this long.

He has been Tony Aliaga, artist representative and friend of the actress since they coincided in the filming of Curro Jiménez, the return of a legend, in the mid-nineties, who has sounded the alarm. Aliaga arranged like every December 3 to call the artist at her home to congratulate her on her birthday. He found that his phone number was off. It was the same number she had called just three months before to talk about the progress of their lives: Agatha led a placid existence as a retiree and, as she told her friend, things as mundane as having achieved the Renfe Golden Card.

The representative has been trying to contact the actress for weeks, obtaining the only response from the robotic voice of the automatic mailbox. Surprised, because Ágata always had the habit of returning calls and being operational, he resorted to the services of the Civil Registry yesterday morning, which confirmed his death. At the beginning of this year, the actress contacted Aliaga to communicate her desire to include him in her will in order to make him the recipient of some personal belongings, which makes her suspect a possible illness that she decided to carry in secret. This discretion is the same with which he completely retired from public life in 2007. After shooting more than eighty episodes of the series Love in troubled times, decided to end his career and since then has declined any type of interview or intervention in the media. At that time, he left his home in Majadahonda to enjoy an early retirement in the Malaga municipality of Benalmádena, where he died.

It was its first representative Fernando Butragueño who at the beginning of his career proposed to García San Segundo to work under the sonorous name of Ágata Lys. It was nothing more than arriving in Madrid to undertake Dramatic Art studies. At this stage, around 1972, she received the offer to be a hostess for a new television contest directed by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador called One, two, three, answer again. He couldn’t imagine how successful the show would be. The artist dyed herself blonde with the intention of going unnoticed by her parents, but a few weeks were enough for her to become one of the most popular women in the country.

The cinema immediately knocked on his door to offer him supporting roles alongside Carmen Sevilla, José Sacristán or Manolo Escobar. With the arrival of the Transition and the so-called uncover cinema, Ágata Lys was elevated as a sex symbol and began to star in films among which stand out The new Marilyn, Eroticism and computing, The French garden The Vogel’s Merry Vampires. In just seven years he shot around forty feature films. During the eighties he ventured with musical shows such as You are agitating The Agate with madness, which led him to tour the national geography.

Despite her undeniable character as the muse of uncovering, Lys managed to take a leap that many other actresses of her genre could not take: Mario Camus trusted her to embody Juan Diego’s lover in his adaptation of The holy innocents, Carlos Saura called her to Taxi and Fernando León de Aranoa counted on her for his award-winning debut feature, Family. In 2004 he would shoot his last film, Bad grape, along with Sancho Gracia and Terele Pávez. The theater was also part of his career with works such as Storm hair by Francisco Nieva, along with Rossy de Palma and Pilar Bardem.

Ágata Lys leaves in silence. Leave behind the echo of the fury that it caused in its heyday, and perhaps tired of waiting for recognition that never came. That injustice is constantly inflicting on actresses of his genre and generation.