Salma Hayek, the actress who produced her own Oscar role and at 60 directs her first feature

Salma Hayek

Photo: Martin Kraft / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 2, 1966 Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, Mexico
Occupation	Actress, film producer and director
Known for	Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, From Dusk Till Dawn, Eternals
Awards	Emmy · Golden Globe · TVyNovelas · Women in Film Lucy · Knight of the Legion of Honour · Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

When Salma Hayek arrived in Los Angeles as one of the best-known faces on Mexican television, she was told that her accent would make audiences think of housekeepers. She has repeated the line for decades, without much bitterness and without letting anyone forget it. It explains most of what she did next. The parts Hollywood offered a Mexican woman were few and narrow, so she learned to make her own: she found the rights, assembled the cast, raised the money and played the lead. The film that earned her an Oscar nomination, Frida, exists because she produced it herself and refused to let it go.

That habit is now taking her somewhere new. At sixty, after years of producing other people’s projects and directing a television film and a few music videos, she is shooting her first feature for cinema as writer and director, in the Mexican state where she was born. The actress once filed under exotic love interest is running the set.

A Veracruz childhood, a Louisiana convent and a telenovela

Hayek grew up in Coatzacoalcos, the oil port in Veracruz where she was born on September 2, 1966. Her father, Sami Hayek Domínguez, is of Lebanese descent, from a family with roots in the town of Baabdat; he ran an industrial-equipment business, worked as an oil executive and once ran for mayor of the city. Her mother, Diana Jiménez Medina, of Spanish descent, is an opera singer who also worked as a talent scout. Her younger brother, Sami, became a furniture designer.

The family was prosperous and devoutly Catholic. At twelve she chose to board at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, where she was diagnosed with dyslexia. Back in Mexico she enrolled at the Universidad Iberoamericana to study international relations, but television came first. A debut in Un nuevo amanecer in 1988 won her a TVyNovelas award for best new actress, and Televisa then cast her, at twenty-three, in the title role of Teresa. The telenovela ran for 125 episodes between 1989 and 1991 and made her famous across the country.

Starting again in English

She gave it up. In 1991 she moved to Los Angeles with limited English and a reading disorder, took language lessons and studied acting with Stella Adler. Work was scarce. She later said there was simply no industry and no parts for Latin women. She picked up guest spots on Dream On and The Sinbad Show, a supporting role in Allison Anders’s Mi vida loca, and a part in the Showtime thriller Roadracers, the first of several collaborations with Robert Rodriguez.

Mexico still wanted her. Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, who ran Televisa, offered an exclusive deal to bring her home; she turned it down. Instead she went back for one film, Jorge Fons’s El callejón de los milagros, an adaptation of the Naguib Mahfouz novel moved from Cairo to Mexico City. She played Alma, a poor young woman who drifts into prostitution. The film was reported to have won more awards than any other film in the history of Mexican cinema, and it earned Hayek a nomination for the Ariel Award for best actress.

Rodriguez, Banderas and a role she had to fight to keep clothed

Rodriguez and his then producing partner Elizabeth Avellan cast her opposite Antonio Banderas in Desperado, after several auditions. The love scene was the hardest part of the shoot: she did not want to appear nude, and has said the scene took eight hours to film instead of one. Made for about seven million dollars, the film grossed more than twenty-five million in the United States and made her face familiar to American audiences. A short appearance as a vampire queen in From Dusk Till Dawn, dancing on a table with a python around her shoulders, fixed that face in a particular kind of memory.

Romantic comedy followed. In Fools Rush In, opposite Matthew Perry, Roger Ebert singled out her performance in a film he called a sweet retread of an old formula. Then came 54, Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty, and Kevin Smith’s Dogma, in which she played Serendipity, a muse who inspired the great artists and never got the credit. Wild Wild West, beside Will Smith, was one of the most expensive films of its day and a commercial failure.

Frida, and what it cost

In 1999 she founded her own production company, Ventanarosa. Its first feature was Arturo Ripstein’s El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, Mexico’s submission for the foreign-language Oscar. She produced and starred in the television film In the Time of the Butterflies as Minerva Mirabal, one of the sisters who defied the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.

The project that defined her had been in her head since she was thirteen or fourteen. She has admitted that she first found Frida Kahlo’s paintings ugly and grotesque, then kept looking. To get the film made she sought out Dolores Olmedo, who controlled the rights to Kahlo’s and Diego Rivera’s work, and approached Alfred Molina to play Rivera in 1998. Julie Taymor directed. Frida opened in 2002 to strong reviews and arthouse success, won two Academy Awards, for makeup and for Elliot Goldenthal’s score, and made Hayek the first Mexican actress nominated for the Oscar for best actress. She was also nominated for the Golden Globe, the BAFTA and the Screen Actors Guild award.

Fifteen years later she described the price. In a New York Times essay published in December 2017, she wrote that Harvey Weinstein, whose company Miramax distributed the film, had harassed her and, when she refused his advances, turned the production into a battle, including demanding a sex scene with full-frontal nudity and threatening to shut the film down. The essay recast the triumph of her career as something she had survived as much as achieved.

Behind the camera, quietly

She kept producing and began directing. The Maldonado Miracle, a Showtime film she produced and directed, won her the Daytime Emmy for outstanding directing in a children’s special. She directed a music video for Prince, served on the jury of the Cannes Film Festival in 2005, and adapted the Colombian telenovela Yo soy Betty, la fea for American television with Ben Silverman. The result, Ugly Betty, ran on ABC from 2006 to 2010, won the Golden Globe for best comedy series, and brought her two Primetime Emmy nominations, one as a guest actress and one as executive producer.

Her acting in those years was mixed. Once Upon a Time in Mexico closed the Rodriguez trilogy profitably; After the Sunset, with Pierce Brosnan, flopped. Bandidas paired her with her friend Penélope Cruz as bank robbers, and Lonely Hearts cast her as the murderer Martha Beck.

The commercial years and the critical problem

From 2010 Hayek became, to a large audience, a comedy and franchise presence. Grown Ups, alongside Adam Sandler, made more than 270 million dollars despite dismal reviews, and its sequel repeated the pattern. She voiced Kitty Softpaws opposite Banderas in Puss in Boots and its acclaimed follow-up, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. The Hitman’s Bodyguard and its sequel cast her as the foul-mouthed wife of Samuel L. Jackson’s killer, a role critics enjoyed more than the films around it.

This is where the usual story about her gets too tidy. The sex-symbol image that sold her early films never fully left, and long lists of the world’s most beautiful women have sometimes drowned out work that deserved attention: Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales, in competition at Cannes, where she played a queen desperate for a child; or Miguel Arteta’s Beatriz at Dinner, in which her quiet holistic healer unravels a rich man’s dinner party, a performance that earned her an Independent Spirit Award nomination. She has also been inconsistent in public, once saying she was not a feminist before revising that position. And the producer who fought for Frida has spent much of her screen time in studio comedies that ask little of her. Both things are true at once.

Ajak, Gucci and Jolie

Chloé Zhao chose her to play Ajak, the leader of the immortal heroes in Marvel’s Eternals. Hayek said seeing the costume made her emotional, because a Mexican woman in her fifties was being allowed to be a superhero. The film made about 400 million dollars worldwide, her biggest live-action success. Ridley Scott then cast her as Pina Auriemma, the confidante of Lady Gaga’s Patrizia Reggiani, in House of Gucci. She played herself in the Black Mirror episode “Joan Is Awful” and appeared in Magic Mike’s Last Dance.

Angelina Jolie cast her as Nina in Without Blood, an adaptation of Alessandro Baricco’s novel in which a woman confronts, decades later, one of the men who killed her family during a war. Demián Bichir plays the man across the table. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2024 to mixed reviews, many of which praised the two leads more than the film, and reached American cinemas in September 2026. She also appears in Romain Gavras’s satire Sacrifice, with Chris Evans and Anya Taylor-Joy, which premiered in Toronto in 2025 and was acquired by Netflix for the United States.

Causes, companies and family

Off screen she has worked most persistently on violence against women. In 2005 she testified before the United States Senate in support of renewing the Violence Against Women Act, and she sits on the board of V-Day, the organisation founded by Eve Ensler. On a UNICEF trip to Sierra Leone in 2009 she breastfed a week-old baby whose mother could not produce milk, to challenge the stigma around breastfeeding. With Beyoncé and Frida Giannini she launched Chime for Change, a Gucci campaign for women’s rights, in 2013, and she has long been a spokesperson for the Pampers and UNICEF programme that funds tetanus vaccines. In business she launched her own cosmetics line, Nuance by Salma Hayek, in 2011.

She is a naturalised American citizen. In 2007 she announced her engagement to François-Henri Pinault, the head of the luxury group Kering, and gave birth to their daughter, Valentina, that September. They married in Paris on Valentine’s Day 2009. In 2015 she travelled with her father to Baabdat while promoting Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, an animated film she produced and described as a love letter to her heritage. France made her a knight of the Legion of Honour in 2011; Hollywood gave her a star on the Walk of Fame in 2021; Time named her among the hundred most influential people in the world in 2023.

Sixty, Paris and a set of her own

The current year has been crowded. As an ambassador for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, she gave the welcome speech at the opening ceremony at the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City on June 11, before the parade of the 48 national flags. She turned sixty on September 2 and marked it on Instagram with the caption “60 y agradecida”. In a conversation with Jolie for The Cut she said she now lives full-time in Paris, in a new house, and called herself an empty nester. She is also back as Roxanne in Grown Ups 3, which Netflix began shooting in New Jersey in August.

The project that matters most to her is Arena, which she wrote and is directing, with Yura Borisov and Cara Delevingne in the cast and Philippe Le Sourd as cinematographer. Jolie, Stacy Perskie and her longtime producing partner José Tamez are producing. Hayek describes it as a forbidden love story about finding intense pleasure in the simple things people take for granted, and it is being filmed in Quintana Roo and in Veracruz, the state where she was born. No release date has been set. More than three decades after she was told what her accent would suggest to an audience, she is the one deciding what the audience sees.

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Tags: actors, Salma Hayek, Robert Rodriguez, Angelina Jolie, film producers, Mexican actresses

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