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Salma on Frida and Madonna

Salma on Frida and Madonna

Sometimes it's not who you know but what you have in common with the right people. Actress Salma Hayek worked for six years to bring Frida, a biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, to the screen. But it was Madonna who helped give the project a boost, albeit indirectly. For almost as long as Hayek developed Frida, Madonna, and then Jennifer Lopez, were attached to star in their own biographies of Kahlo.

“For one reason or another they didn't do their versions,” Hayek said in an interview with The Blade. But she said she's grateful to Madonna. “She wanted to do a Frida film and gave up on it, but because she was interested early on, and because everyone wants to know what Madonna is doing, it gave attention to Frida and to our film. It helped.”

To say the least: In an Oscar season where Latino films like Talk to Her and Y Tu Mama Tambien have landed impressive nominations in the director and original screenplay categories, Frida, which is in English and was produced by Miramax, received six Academy Award nominations alone, including one for Hayek as best actress.

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Julie Taymor, the acclaimed creator of Broadway's The Lion King, directed Frida, and she sees it as “an international film first and foremost,. The landscape is so varied. The characters and actors come from Australia, Argentina, Italy. If this film were in Spanish, I probably wouldn't have directed it. I don't speak Spanish. Would it have been better in Spanish? Well, it wouldn't be this film, with this set of actors.”

“There is no movie of Frida in the Spanish language,” Hayek said. “The truth is, and being Mexican myself, I don't think that the first language of this film is English.

“I think of it as visuals, but I think that was Frida's first language too: imagination, a certain visual freedom.”

The biggest trouble with making a biography, she said, especially one about an icon from a culture not often represented by American film, is you can't make anyone happy. “You have two hours to tell 30 years of an extraordinary life,” Taymor said. “One gets selective.”

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“I decided the best film I could possibly make would have to be my interpretation of Frida,” Hayek added, “and not just that she is a bisexual or that she was courageous - my interpretation of her life and meaning.

“And still I felt a lot of pressure to say more, to do more. I wanted to wear a fake nose at one point, but it made me look like a witch. We tried using a mustache, like she had, but it was weird.

“I used the one eyebrow, but if anything it made me regretful. I went through the pain of plucking my own unibrow once, and now I need it back.”

First Published March 16, 2003, 10:06 a.m.

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