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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. |
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