Name : Salma Hayek
Real Name : Salma Hayek Jimenez
Date Of Birth : September 2, 1966
Place of Birth : Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, Mexico
Height : 5'2''
Weight : 115 lbs
Eyes : Dark brown
Hair : Black
Occupation : Actress
Education : College dropout
Companion : Edward Norton
Fan Mail : C/O William Morris Agency
151 El Camino Drive
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
USA
Salma Hayek Detailed Biography
A bona fide celebrity goddess in her native Mexico, Salma Hayek emigrated in 1991 to Los Angeles, where Salma Hayek 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 Salma Hayek co-stars, Salma 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, Salma 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 Hayek'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, Salma Hayek's staunchly Catholic parents shipped her off to a boarding school in Louisiana when Salma Hayek was 12. While the beguiling youngster proved both attentively studious and properly religious, Salma Hayek also displayed a bent for mischief that Salma Hayek chiefly directed against the long-suffering nuns who ran the school: among other infamies, Salma Hayek 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 Salma Hayek ended up suspended and carted back home after just two years. It only took her two more years to finish high school, and Salma Hayek's mother, fearful of the effects ''college boys'' might have on her impressionable young daughter, sent Salma Hayek to Houston, where she lived with an aunt until her 17th birthday.
Returning to Mexico once more, Salma Hayek relocated to Mexico City to attend college, where Salma Hayek commenced international relations studies. Though she had harbored acting ambitions since childhood, Salma Hayek had for years been reluctant to seriously pursue such a chancy vocation for fear of alienating her parents. Ultimately, Salma Hayek decided the path of the dutiful daughter and stable career girl was one she could not bear to walk and frankly confronted Salma Hayek's parents about her aspiration. As Salma Hayek 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, Salma Hayek quit college and determinedly embarked on an acting career. Salma Hayek 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, Salma 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, Salma 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, Salma 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 Salma Hayek 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. Salma Hayek's first big break came in 1993, when Salma Hayek 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 Salma Hayek 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 Salma 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 Salma 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 Salma 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, Salma 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 Salma Hayek portrayed Esmerelda to Mandy Patinkin's Quasimodo.
Salma Hayek's film agenda continues to offer a steady diet of roles: Salma Hayekfollowed 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.
