Valentina Paloma Pinault

Salma Hayek Pinault (, ; born Salma Valgarma Hayek Jiménez; September 2, 1966) is a Mexican and American actress and film producer.

Hayek's first screen appearance was in the television series in Un Nuevo Amanecer (1988), which earned her the TVyNovelas Award for Best Debut Actress.

She began her career in Mexico with starring roles in the telenovela Teresa (1989–1991) as well as the romantic drama Midaq Alley (1995).

Televisa subsequently selected Hayek, who was 23 at the time, to play the title role in Teresa (1989–1991), a successful Mexican telenovela that made her a star in Mexico.

The series ran for two years and 125 episodes, and earned her the 1990 TVyNovelas Award for Best Female Revelation.

Determined to pursue a film career in Hollywood, Hayek moved to Los Angeles in 1991 following the conclusion of Teresa.

With limited fluency in English and dyslexia, she soon enrolled in English lessons and studied acting under Stella Adler.

Hayek initially struggled with the lack of acting job offers after moving to the United States, recalling that "there was no industry or parts for Latin women", and was once even told that her accent would "make moviegoers think of housekeepers".

During this period, she secured guest-spots in television series such as Dream On (1992) and The Sinbad Show (1993) as well as supporting roles in the drama Mi Vida Loca (1993), and the made-for-Showtime thriller Roadracers (1994), her first collaboration with director Robert Rodriguez.

In 1994, Hayek was cast as Alma, a poverty-stricken young woman who becomes a sex worker, in Jorge Fons's drama El callejón de los milagros (Miracle Alley), which was based on the 1940s eponymous novel by Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz and translated from Cairo to Mexico City.

The film was the subject of critical acclaim, reportedly won more awards than any other movie in the history of Mexican cinema, and earned Hayek a nomination for the Ariel Award for Best Actress.

She soon established herself in Hollywood with appearances in films such as Desperado (1995), From Dusk till Dawn (1996), Wild Wild West (1999), and Dogma (1999).

Robert Rodriguez and his co-producer and then-wife, Elizabeth Avellan, cast Hayek in the starring role of the self-confident and feisty Carolina, opposite Antonio Banderas, in Desperado (1995), widely considered her breakout film.

Describing the film's process as "grueling", Hayek had to audition several times for Rodriguez before landing the part and a love scene in the script proved particularly difficult for her to film, because she did not want to be nude on camera.

She once remarked: "It took eight hours [to film] instead of an hour".

Budgeted at $7 million, Desperado was a commercial success, grossing $25.4 million in the United States.

She followed it with a brief role as a vampire queen in Rodriguez's cult horror film From Dusk till Dawn (1996), in which she performed an erotic table-top snake dance.

In 1996, she also appeared in the drama Follow Me Home and the cop comedy Fled.

She also produced and played Minerva Mirabal in the Showtime film In the Time of the Butterflies (2001) and guest-starred on the NBC comedy series 30 Rock (2009–2013).

As a public figure, Hayek has been cited as one of Hollywood's most powerful and influential Latina actresses as well as one of the world's most beautiful women by various media outlets.

Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2023.

She is married to business magnate François-Henri Pinault, with whom she has a daughter.

Salma Hayek was born in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, Mexico.

Her father, Sami Hayek Domínguez, is of Lebanese descent.

Hayek's portrayal of painter Frida Kahlo in the biopic Frida (2002), which she also produced, made her the first Mexican actress to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

In subsequent years, Hayek focused more on producing while starring in the action-centered pictures Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003), After the Sunset (2004) and Bandidas (2006).

She won the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing in a Children Special for The Maldonado Miracle (2004) and received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations, one for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series and the other for Outstanding Comedy Series, for her work on the ABC television comedy-drama Ugly Betty (2006–2010).

She achieved further commercial success with the comedies Grown Ups (2010), Grown Ups 2 (2013) and The Hitman's Bodyguard (2017), and lent her voice for the animated Puss in Boots (2011) and Sausage Party (2016).

In a 2011 interview with V magazine, Hayek mentioned that she was once an illegal immigrant in the United States, although it was not for a long period of time.

She also earned critical acclaim for her performances in the dramas Tale of Tales (2015), Beatriz at Dinner (2017) and House of Gucci (2021).

She played Ajak in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Eternals (2021), which emerged as her highest-grossing live action film.

Hayek's directing, producing and acting work on television has earned her four Emmy Awards nominations.

His ancestors hail from the city of Baabdat, Lebanon, a city Salma and her father visited in 2015 to promote her movie Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet.

He owns an industrial-equipment firm and is an oil company executive in Mexico; he once ran for mayor of Coatzacoalcos.

Her mother, Diana Jiménez Medina, is an opera singer and talent scout; she is of Spanish descent.

While visiting Madrid in an interview in 2015 with Un Nuevo Día, Hayek described herself as fifty-percent Lebanese and fifty-percent Spanish saying that her grandmother/maternal great-grandparents were from Spain.

Her younger brother, Sami, is a furniture designer.

Hayek was raised in a wealthy, devout Catholic family, and at age 12 opted to study at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Grand Coteau, Louisiana.

In school, she was diagnosed with dyslexia.

She attended university at the Universidad Iberoamericana studying international relations.