A sultry and sensuous brunette, Sonia Braga began her career in her native Brazil as a teenager and made her stage debut at 17. From the late 1960s, she began to amass an impressive body of work, including appearances in several soap opera-like miniseries (telenovelas). Braga became an international sex symbol as a woman torn between her living spouse and the ghost of her dead one in Bruno Barreto's "Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands" (1977). She and Barreto reunited in 1983 for a film version of one of her most famous TV roles, "Gabriela".

With her growing popularity it wasn't long before