Sometimes you have to give up a sure
thing to follow your dreams. Just ask Salma Hayek. She said adios to her native
Mexico and the lead role in the hit soap Teresa to pursue the fantasy she'd had
since childhood of starring in movies. After a few years of obscurity, she seduced
Hollywood with her dark beauty, flawless comic timing, volcanic sensuality, and
an intelligence that shines through every performance.
Hayek
has shared steamy love scenes with some of filmdom's leading men, including Antonio
Banderas, George Clooney, and Will Smith. At the same time she has worked with
a list of directors that reads like a Who's Who of the independent film revolution
(Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Mike Figgis), and become a
busy producer in her own right. If versatility is a virtue, then Salma Hayek is
very, very good indeed. Born on September 2, 1966, in the
oil boomtown of Coatzacoalcos, Mexico, Hayek has freely admitted that she and
her brother Sami were spoiled rotten by her Lebanese businessman father and her
Mexican-born opera-singing mother. How spoiled? As a child, Salma cajoled her
father into buying her a series of pet tigers. She kept her favorite, Rambo, in
the house until he died in an accident she remains reluctant to discuss. Despite
such extravagances, Hayek recalls Coatzacoalcos as a small city where rich and
poor mingled easily. She remembers going to dingy movie theaters where she often
sat next to the man who shined her father's shoes. It was in one such cinema that
she first saw Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and decided she wanted to
be an actress. "Why," she asked herself, "would anyone want to
do anything else in life?" Hayek's education included
a stint at a New Orleans convent school, where she pulled pranks on the nuns by
setting their clocks back three hours. She was soon expelled. Only after attending
Mexico City's Universidad Iberoamericana did she feel ready to pursue acting seriously.
"I never committed to anything until acting," she's told reporters.
Hayek's effect on audiences was immediate and intense.
When she played Jasmine in a regional theater production of Aladdin, boys cried
out for her and even climbed on stage. Aladdin led to an appearance in the soap
opera Nuevo Amanecer and, ultimately, the lead in Teresa. In 1989 Hayek and the
brazenly campy and melodramatic Teresa—a poor but audacious 18-year-old
social climber who would stop at nothing to get rich—became Mexican media
sensations. |
