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A bona fide celebrity
goddess in her native Mexico, Hayek emigrated in 1991 to Los
Angeles, where she willingly plunged to the bottom of the heap
in order to take a shot at conquering Hollywood. Intensive
lessons, both in English and acting, paid handsome dividends
in 1995, when the diminutive dynamo lit a fire under Antonio
Banderas in wunderkind director Robert Rodriguez's balletic
bullet ballad Desperado. Continuing to collect hunky co-stars,
Hayek struck sparks with a Baldwin brother in both Fair Game
and Fled, and made an undead love slave out of George Clooney
in From Dusk 'Til Dawn. Salma Hayek Internet shrines cropped
up like weeds, and in 1997 the sultry spitfire landed her
first lead role in the States, playing opposite Friends fave
Matthew Perry in the cross-cultural romantic comedy Fools Rush
In.
The daughter of a Lebanese-descended father and a
Spanish-descended mother, Hayek was born and raised in
Coatzacoalcos, Mexico. Determined to see that her grandchild
develop into a ravishing beauty, her grandmother frequently
shaved young Salma's head and clipped her eyebrows, in the
belief that such treatments would add body and sheen to her
granddaughter's thick dark locks. Equally determined to see
that she became well-educated, Hayek's staunchly Catholic
parents shipped her off to a boarding school in Louisiana when
she was 12. While the beguiling youngster proved both
attentively studious and properly religious, she also
displayed a bent for mischief that she chiefly directed
against the long-suffering nuns who ran the school: among
other infamies, she once slipped into the faculty dormitory
and set all of the alarm clocks back three hours. The end
result of such she-nun-igans was that Hayek ended up suspended
and carted back home after just two years. It only took her
two more years to finish high school, and her mother, fearful
of the effects ''college boys'' might have on her
impressionable young daughter, sent Hayek to Houston, where
she lived with an aunt until her 17th birthday.
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