Salma Hayek
| Salma Hayek Biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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A bona
fide celebrity goddess in her native Mexico, Hayek emigrated in 1991 to
Los Angeles, where she willingly plunged to the bottom of the heap in
order to take a shot at conquering Hollywood. Intensive lessons, both
in English and acting, paid handsome dividends in 1995, when the
diminutive dynamo lit a fire under Antonio Banderas in wunderkind
director Robert Rodriguez's balletic bullet ballad Desperado.
Continuing to collect hunky co-stars, Hayek struck sparks with a
Baldwin brother in both Fair Game and Fled, and made an undead love
slave out of George Clooney in From Dusk 'Til Dawn. Salma Hayek
Internet shrines cropped up like weeds, and in 1997 the sultry spitfire
landed her first lead role in the States, playing opposite Friends fave
Matthew Perry in the cross-cultural romantic comedy Fools Rush In.
The
daughter of a Lebanese-descended father and a Spanish-descended mother,
Hayek was born and raised in Coatzacoalcos, Mexico. Determined to see
that her grandchild develop into a ravishing beauty, her grandmother
frequently shaved young Salma's head and clipped her eyebrows, in the
belief that such treatments would add body and sheen to her
granddaughter's thick dark locks. Equally determined to see that she
became well-educated, Hayek's staunchly Catholic parents shipped her
off to a boarding school in Louisiana when she was 12. While the
beguiling youngster proved both attentively studious and properly
religious, she also displayed a bent for mischief that she chiefly
directed against the long-suffering nuns who ran the school: among
other infamies, she once slipped into the faculty dormitory and set all
of the alarm clocks back three hours. The end result of such
she-nun-igans was that Hayek ended up suspended and carted back home
after just two years. It only took her two more years to finish high
school, and her mother, fearful of the effects ''college boys'' might
have on her impressionable young daughter, sent Hayek to Houston, where
she lived with an aunt until her 17th birthday.
Returning to
Mexico once more, Hayek relocated to Mexico City to attend college,
where she commenced international relations studies. Though she had
harbored acting ambitions since childhood, Hayek had for years been
reluctant to seriously pursue such a chancy vocation for fear of
alienating her parents. Ultimately, she decided the path of the dutiful
daughter and stable career girl was one she could not bear to walk and
frankly confronted her parents about her aspiration. As she later told
one interviewer, ''One day I took my dad to lunch. I asked him if he
believed in destiny and he said, 'Yes.' And I said, 'Well, I believe
it's my destiny to become an actress.''' In spite of voluble objections
from her family and the derision and disbelief of her friends, Hayek
quit college and determinedly embarked on an acting career. She first
found work in plays at neighborhood theaters, including one assignment
as the heroine of Aladdin and His Marvelous Lamp. Several months of
tireless stage work led to jobs making television commercials, which in
turn yielded a casting in Nuevo Amanecer, a popular daytime TV serial.
With no more experience than that to her credit, Hayek got herself cast
as the title character of a second serial, Teresa, the phenomenal
popularity of which almost immediately made its fetching young star the
most fanatically revered actress in Mexico.
Not content to
settle for the comparatively meager rewards of superstardom,
Mexican-style, Hayek set her confident sights on Hollywood, and moved
north in 1991. What followed thereafter was a taxing period of
adjustment, beginning with an 18-month hiatus from acting that was
primarily occupied with English lessons. Also during that period, Hayek
studied acting under famed dramatician Stella Adler, and taught herself
to drive a car: two days of stick-shift driving convinced her to switch
to automatic, and she slowly acquainted herself with the tangled maze
of L.A.'s freeways by continually requesting directions from her more
streetwise friends via her trusty cellular phone. Hayek's first big
break came in 1993, when she spent four months auditioning for a
headlining role in Allison Anders's girlz-'n'-the-hood drama Mi Vida
Loca. Anders eventually cast another actress in the desired-for lead
assignment, but Hayek's tenacity so impressed the director that she
gave her a smaller part in the film for the express purpose of enabling
the promising young actress to qualify for membership in the Screen
Actors Guild.
Other small roles followed, mostly on
television, but it was an appearance on a Spanish-language cable-access
talk show that led to Hayek's big breakthrough. While in the process of
planning a sequel to his wildly successful debut film, El Mariachi,
Mexican-American director Robert Rodriguez happened to tune in to
Hayek's talk show appearance during a fit of late-night channel
surfing. Mesmerized by the lovely and engaging actress, Rodriguez
wasted no time tracking her down, and soon secured her interest in
tackling the female lead in his soon-to-be-produced big-studio debut,
Desperado. Rodriguez's financial backers initially resisted his choice
of Hayek, but the director won them over by showcasing her in his
made-for-cable installment of Showtime's Rebel Highway series,
Roadracers. A solid commercial success, Desperado also garnered Hayek
rave reviews for her show-stopping, saliva-inducing performance.
Despite the fact she was disappointingly underrepresented in her next
two outings, in the limp thrillers Fair Game and Fled, Hayek's
performances nevertheless provided much-needed zip for both projects,
and 1997 found her nicely romantically matched in both Fools Rush In
and TNT's adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which she
portrayed Esmerelda to Mandy Patinkin's Quasimodo.
Hayek's film agenda continues to offer a steady diet
of roles: She followed her turn in the disco redux 54 with an
appearance alongside Will Smith and Kevin Kline in Wild Wild West, and
co-starred with Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Chris Rock, Linda Fiorentino,
and Alan Rickman in Kevin Smith's Dogma. Through her Ventanarosa
production company, she co-produced The Velocity of Gary, an offbeat
romantic comedy which teamed her with Ethan Hawke and Vincent
D'Onofrio, and another of her co-productions, the Mexican feature No
One Writes to the Colonel, was recently in competition at Cannes. Hayek
is currently filming the biopic Frida, in which she tackles a
much-coveted portrayal of painter Frida Kahlo.
On a more personal note, Hayek is romantically attached to actor Ed Norton.