Salma Hayek gets serious

Salma Hayek received Bafta and Oscar nominations for her performance in the film 'Frida', which she also produced. Geoffrey MacNab asks her what's next

It's late afternoon, in a suite at the Dorchester Hotel, and Salma Hayek is in full flow, describing one of her favourite paintings by Frida Kahlo. She is gregarious and fast-talking. Sitting cross-legged, sipping cola and smoking, she doesn't praise one of those austere self-portraits in which Frida stares out, with a saturnine expression and an image of her unfaithful husband, Diego Rivera, emblazoned on her brow. It's The Suicide of Dorothy Hale that she wants to talk about.

This was a picture commissioned in 1938 by Clare Boothe Luce, publisher of Vanity Fair. Luce was hoping for a conventional painting of Hale, an actress friend who had recently committed suicide by jumping out of the window of her high-rise apartment. What she got was macabre but comic images of a body falling through the clouds and of a beautiful woman in a ball dress lying in a pool of blood on the pavement.

"Yes, Frida wanted to be independent and make some money, but she never really compromised," says Hayek. "She had her style and if people didn't like it, that was it – she didn't try to modify it. She haunts me."

Five years ago, no one would have believed that Hayek was capable of playing someone as complex as Frida. Back in the mid to late 1990s, when she was co-starring in films such as Wild Wild West and Fled, the 36-year-old actress was treated as if she was just another Hispanic sex-symbol – a 1990s counterpart to the original "Mexican spitfire", Lupe Velez. She freely admits that she was taking parts to pay the rent. ("I commit, even to the stupid movies. Once I say yes, I go and I give it my best.") Her fellow-Mexicans weren't always impressed. "Every film she does, she's the girl with the big boobs. Is that being an actress? I don't consider that being an actress. I consider that selling yourself," says Elpidia Carrillo, star of Tony Richardson's The Border.

It was hardly Hayek's fault that she was typecast. "What is wrong with our industry that all we want from this woman is her physicality?" asks Julie Taymor, the director of Frida. "With beautiful women, no one wants any more than the surface. They're not interested. Salma had so much more to give than people were prepared to take."

Hayek's career had more than its share of false starts. As she told Mike Figgis when interviewed for his book Projections 10: "Hollywood made a very big effort not to let me in... they had a very specific image for Mexicans that I didn't quite fit. Mexicans are gang members, on welfare with kids since they were 15, and they wear make-up and they're tacky and cheesy. They think we're uneducated and have no sense of style." Seen in this light, Frida seems especially courageous.

When she arrived in London, Hayek had had less than a day to digest the news of her Oscar nomination. "Last night, I felt exhausted from joy," she says. "Not many people get to go through what I am going through – to see your family cry out of pride and happiness for you. I don't want to be cynical about it, but at the same time, I don't take it too seriously... my life isn't hanging completely from this thread."

Kahlo used to call the US "Gringolandia", but Hayek is far less dismissive of the country in which she has built her career, whatever obstacles were placed in her path. "I share with her the love for Mexico but I have to say that the United States have been good for me. I have opinions about everything because I am an opinionated woman. But I am grateful. I love Mexico but it's harder for me to live there. Frida didn't have paparazzi following her around in her time."

Frida would never have been made without Hayek. She produced as well as starred, and secured the rights to use Kahlo's paintings from Rivera's lover. "Seven years I have been developing it, thinking about it, but I loved Frida before I knew I was going to be an actress. The project died so many times, when I didn't feel all the elements were there."

Hayek was 14 years old when she first saw one of Kahlo's paintings. Initially, she was revolted by the morbidity and sensuality of them. "They are like somebody screaming their most intimate details. We are not used to being welcomed into such vulnerable places. At first, I thought her work was so horrendous – so weird and bloody and ugly. When you're 14, it's shocking. But I couldn't get it out of my head."

Throughout her adult life, Frida was in considerable pain. In 1925, when she was barely 18, she was almost crushed to death in a bus crash. She was often bedridden. As the film reveals, she had to wear hugely uncomfortable plaster corsets. Despite her reputation as "a sexual, political and artistic revolutionary", her tempestuous relationship with Rivera, her affairs and her travels, it was solitude and frustration that drove her to paint. Hayek blithely announces that conveying Frida's agonies on screen was straightforward. "When you love someone so much, it's easy to feel their pain. The performance was easy. What was difficult was the long hours because I was also the producer."

Hayek didn't want to gloss over the problems in Diego and Frida's relationship. Nevertheless, she insists that there was no professional jealousy between them. "Frida lived under his shadow but she never tried to become a bigshot painter. The only one who really appreciated her was Diego – it was his doing that she had a museum."

Her own relationship with the actor Edward Norton, who (uncredited and unpaid) wrote much of the screenplay for Frida, is clearly less turbulent than that between Diego and Frida: "It works," she declares. "We don't talk about work in our private lives, and we don't talk about our private lives at work." Both she and Julie Taymor are disdainful of the archaic Writers Guild rules that denied Norton credit on Frida. "I had absolute confidence in him as a writer," Hayek says. "If I hadn't, I wouldn't have accepted him, even if he was my boyfriend. The fact that he didn't get credited shocked everybody."

The race to make a film about Frida Kahlo is well chronicled. At one stage, Madonna was lobbying to play the Mexican artist. "It helped a lot because everybody wants to know what Madonna is doing," Hayek says of her onetime rival. By 2000, there were two Frida Kahlo movies close to being green-lit – Salma Hayek's and a version in which Jennifer Lopez was to star. Taymor believes that the right woman won. "Salma even looks like Frida. Enough to put her portrait up there and you'd believe it. Salma is an interesting combination of being Lebanese and Mexican, while Frida was Hungarian-Jewish and Mexican. And she's a dead ringer in size. She even wore one of the real Frida Kahlo's shirts."

Frida was shot on a modest budget – $12m, according to Taymor, who believes that Hayek's Oscar nomination can't help but improve matters for Hispanic actors in Hollywood. "There are so few roles for Latino actors, they're almost non-existent. If they are cast, it's as servants. In the US, Frida has had a huge Latin audience because it's sophisticated."

Having finished Frida, Hayek has now made her directorial debut with a film called The Maldonado Miracle, which premiered at Sundance. "I'm self-sufficient. I can produce, I can direct, I can act," she declares. She acknowledges that her new status ought to enable her to choose her roles. "I don't think I will do another Wild Wild West," she says. "But then, you don't know it's going to be Wild Wild West until you see it."

'Frida' is released on 28 February