Salma Hayek enchanted Hollywood with her rhythm and sensuality, however, she demonstrated her talent for roles with greater creative load, catapulting her as a producer and businesswoman.
Salma Hayek is considered one of the Latin American artists with the greatest impact on the international entertainment industry thanks to her fruitful career full of iconic characters where she has highlighted her sensuality with unforgettable dances for moviegoers around the world.
And, over the last 30 years, she has played everything from a young woman desperate to escape poverty (Teresa) - in a Mexican soap opera - to an empowered superheroine in Disney (Eternals).
Among the multiple roles that she has played on the big screen, characters stand out that positioned her on the entertainment radar due to her attractive and curvy body, a key piece that made her one of the most sensual women in cinema. In addition to her imposing beauty, the actress has conquered the entire world with exotic dances that have even put her life at risk and led her to face one of her biggest fears.
“You or Madonna”: the time she almost lost a character due to a terrible phobia
After making her fellow Mexicans fall in love with her stars, Salma Hayek dared to try her luck in the Hollywood industry. At first, she was rejected because she was outside the canons of beauty then accepted in the United States and other parts of the world. Despite her criticism, she stood firm thanks to the support she received from the renowned Argentine actress, Rosa María Bianchi, as she made it known at a press conference in her native country.
When I started, no one believed in me and they told me that I had no talent, that I was useless, that I was short (1.57 cm tall) and I was very dark, and ugly, that I wasn't going to do it and that I should dedicate myself to something else. Well yes, many times I almost gave up and the person who really taught me, not just acting, but to believe in myself, and partly also because I had great respect for him, was my hero, my idol... I wanted to be Rosa María Bianchi when I grew up; She supported me in a thousand ways.
So in 1996 she played Satánico Pandemonium, a dancer who worked in what appeared to be a Mexican nightclub but was actually a refuge for fearsome vampires. This is From Dusk Till Dawn, a film directed by Robert Rodriguez written by Quentin Tarantino, and starring him, who also served as screenwriter, as well as celebrities such as George Clooney and Harvey Keitel.
It was in this film that Salma Hayek did her first iconic dance despite suffering from Ophidiophobia - fear or panic of snakes. According to what the actress has said in various interviews where she dared to show her most sensual steps surrounded by a yellow python that measured approximately three meters after a warning from the director:
“My fear did not go away and the time to make the film was approaching. Then Robert threatened me, he told me: 'If your fear doesn't go away, I'm going to give your role to Madonna. She's not afraid of it and she's going to do it very well. I had a phobia of bugs as they say here. One day they had to slap me to come to my senses because I saw a dead woman in the distance,” she said in an interview for Viva on Monday in 1997.
So great was his fear that he could not see a snake even dead, but he could not afford to lose a role in an international film, so he resorted to a method to face his fear and be able to record: “I went to get hypnotized. someone told me they could help me and they did something very strange to me, I don't know what it was, witchcraft, but it was something like that that was half esoteric and it went away.”
