Salma Hayek

Info

Full Name: Salma Hayek Pinault
Date of birth: September 2, 1966 (60 years old)
Location: Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz
Country: Mexico

Salma Hayek has been active for 30 years, participating in 46 movies that average a 6.4/10 score.

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Tráiler en VOSE de 'Harry Potter' T1

Biography

For the better part of a decade, Salma Hayek went round Hollywood trying to persuade somebody to make a film about Frida Kahlo. Nobody thought there was money in a Mexican painter with a unibrow. She set up her own production company, got it made anyway, and ended up the first Mexican actress nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. That story tells you most of what you need to know about how she has worked ever since.

Coatzacoalcos, nuns and a telenovela

She was born on 2 September 1966 in Coatzacoalcos, a port town in the Mexican state of Veracruz. Her father, Sami Hayek, was a businessman of Lebanese descent; her mother, Diana Jiménez, an opera singer and talent scout. The family had money and sent her to a convent boarding school in Louisiana, which threw her out. Back in Mexico she started a degree in international relations and didn't finish it. She was diagnosed with dyslexia as a child.

Television made her famous fast. She carried the telenovela 'Teresa' from 1989 to 1991, a hit across Mexico and most of Latin America, and then walked away from it at the peak to start again in Los Angeles.

Starting over in Los Angeles

The first years were rough. Her English was poor, she took classes with the famous coach Stella Adler and the parts on offer were mostly maids. Robert Rodriguez spotted her on a TV talk show and cast her in 'Desperado' (1995) opposite Antonio Banderas.

A year later came the scene that still follows her around, the snake dance in 'From Dusk Till Dawn', written by Quentin Tarantino. She's terrified of snakes and shot it anyway. 'Fools Rush In' (1997), 'Dogma' (1999), 'Wild Wild West' (1999) and 'Traffic' (2000) followed.

Frida, and what it cost her

She founded Ventanarosa in 1999 and kept pushing the Kahlo project until it happened. 'Frida' (2002) was directed by Julie Taymor, with Alfred Molina as Diego Rivera, and brought her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress as well as Golden Globe, BAFTA and SAG nods.

Fifteen years later she explained what the shoot had been like. In December 2017 she published a piece in 'The New York Times' headlined "Harvey Weinstein is my monster too", setting out the pressure, the threats and the humiliations the producer put her through while the film was being made. It remains one of the bluntest accounts anyone gave.

Cats, pirates and Marvel

After that she moved freely between small films and big ones. She voiced Kitty Softpaws in 'Puss in Boots' (2011) and 'Puss in Boots: The Last Wish' (2022), and was Cutlass Liz for Aardman in 'The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!' (2012). The box office came from 'Grown Ups' (2010) with Adam Sandler and 'The Hitman's Bodyguard' (2017).

The other side of her work is something like 'Beatriz at Dinner' (2017), a quiet Miguel Arteta drama about a Mexican masseuse stuck at a rich man's dinner party. Then Chloé Zhao made her Ajak in 'Eternals' (2021), and she turned up in 'House of Gucci' (2021) and in 'Magic Mike's Last Dance' (2023), whose second half she spends dragging Channing Tatum around London and into a West End theatre.

Producer, mother, and now director

A lot of her recent work doesn't show up on screen. Ventanarosa produced 'Ugly Betty' (2006-2010), the ABC remake of a Colombian telenovela, which brought her two Emmy nominations, one for acting and one as a producer. She backed the series 'Santa Evita' (2022) and joined 'Tótem' (2023), by Lila Avilés, as executive producer once it was on the Oscar shortlist.

She married the French businessman François-Henri Pinault in 2009 and they have a daughter, Valentina Paloma, born in September 2007. France made her a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 2011. When her Hollywood Walk of Fame star was unveiled in November 2021, she used the speech to tell the crowd that a man had once attacked her with a knife on that same stretch of pavement, back when she was new in town and out of work.

Her latest release is 'Without Blood', directed by Angelina Jolie and in cinemas since 18 September 2026, and 'Sacrifice', by Romain Gavras, reaches Netflix in October.

She isn't done adding jobs, either. She won a Daytime Emmy back in 2003 for directing a television film, 'The Maldonado Miracle', and she is now shooting 'Arena', her first feature as a director, which she also wrote, produced and acts in, with Yura Borisov and Cara Delevingne. It's being filmed in Veracruz, the state she left thirty-five years ago.