One of Salma Hayek's earliest role was to play Queen of the  Carnival where she was born on September 2, 1968 in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz Mexico, to Sami Hayek Dominguez, a businessman of Lebanese descent who once ran for mayor of their city, and Diana Jiménez, an opera singer and talent scout.

  Salma's  father was a top exec with the
state-owned oil company and mother was an accomplished opera singer. Salma has admitted to having had a very spoiled childhood which included her own private zoo, Colorado ski trips, and summers on Greek islands. “I thought I was a princess, I lived in a castle and my father was a king; I wore tiaras; I was born diva-ish” she told one interviewer.

 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.

Returning to Mexico once more, Hayek relocated to Mexico City to attend college, where she commenced international relations studies. Though she had harbored acting ambitions since childhood, Hayek had for years been reluctant to seriously pursue such a chancy vocation for fear of alienating her parents. Ultimately, she decided the path of the dutiful daughter and stable career girl was one she could not bear to walk and frankly confronted her parents about her aspiration.

As she later told one interviewer, "One day I took my dad to lunch. I asked him if he believed in destiny and he said, 'Yes.' And I said, 'Well, I believe it's my destiny to become an actress.'"
In spite of voluble objections from her family and the derision and disbelief of her friends, Hayek quit college and determinedly embarked on an acting career. She first found work in plays at neighborhood theaters, including one assignment as the heroine of Aladdin and His Marvelous Lamp. Several months of tireless stage work led to jobs making television commercials, which in turn yielded a casting in Nuevo Amanecer, a popular daytime TV serial. With no more experience than that to her credit, Hayek got herself cast as the title character of a second serial, Teresa, the phenomenal popularity of which almost immediately made its fetching young star the most fanatically revered actress in Mexico.

The hugely successful soap opera Teresa (1989) gave Hayek a career most Mexican actresses dream of yet this was not to be Salma's fate. Risking everything, Hayek had to follow her dreams of going to Hollywood and shocked the entire country when she quit the top-rated show and left for Hollywood. After arriving in LA in '91, Hayek spent extensive time learning English and acting. She also met Richard Crenna Jr. there when they took acting lessons and were briefly engaged but later broke up and called it off.

What followed thereafter was a taxing period of adjustment, beginning with an 18-month hiatus from acting that was primarily occupied with English lessons. Also during that period, Hayek studied acting under famed dramatician Stella Adler, and taught herself to drive a car: two days of stick-shift driving convinced her to switch to automatic, and she slowly acquainted herself with the tangled maze of L.A.'s freeways by continually requesting directions from her more streetwise friends via her trusty cellular phone.

The 24 year old actress approached Hollywood with naive enthusiasm, and quickly learned that Latin actresses were, if at all, typecast as the mistress maid or local prostitute. By late 1992, Hayek had landed only bit parts. She appeared on "Street Justice" (1991), The Sinbad Show, "Nurses" (1991), and as a sexy maid on the HBO series "Dream On" (1990). She also had one line in the Allison Anders film Mi Vida Loca. Feeling under-appreciated by Anglo filmmakers, Hayek vented her frustrations on comedian Paul Rodriguez's late-night Spanish-language talk show in 1992.

Hayek's first big break came in 1993, when she spent four months auditioning for a headlining role in Allison Anders's girlz-'n'-the-hood drama Mi Vida Loca. Anders eventually cast another actress in the desired-for lead assignment, but Hayek's tenacity so impressed the director that she gave her a smaller part in the film for the express purpose of enabling the promising young actress to qualify for membership in the Screen Actors Guild.

Other small roles followed, mostly on television, but it was an appearance on a Spanish-language cable-access talk show that led to Hayek's big breakthrough. While in the process of planning a sequel to his wildly successful debut film, El Mariachi, Mexican-American director Robert Rodriguez happened to tune in to Hayek's talk show appearance during a fit of late-night channel surfing. Mesmerized by the lovely and engaging actress, Rodriguez wasted no time tracking her down, and soon secured her interest in tackling the female lead in his soon-to-be-produced big-studio debut, Desperado. Rodriguez's financial backers initially resisted his choice of Hayek, but the director won them over by showcasing her in his made-for-cable installment of Showtime's Rebel Highway series, Roadracers.

 Starring opposite Antonio Banderas, the movie was the start of her highly successful movie career. Though  Next up came the movies Fair Game and Fled where she co-starred with William Baldwin. Her roles in 1997 brought the acclaimed Fools Rush In and the TNT movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame.where she dated co-star Edward Atterton for an extensive amount of time before later breaking off the relationship. Salma's latest roles in 1999 brought the much hyped but much disappointing Wild Wild West which co-starred Will Smith, as well as Dogma, which stars Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Chris Rock. In Wild Wild West, Salma was so nervous about her nude scene she cleared the studio and was further instigated when Will hung a BA as she was turning to read her lines, but the ever cool Salma didn't even flinch to the displeasure of Smith who presumably wanted to see Salma's fine bod a little longer!

A solid commercial success, Desperado also garnered Hayek rave reviews for her show-stopping, saliva-inducing performance. Despite the fact she was disappointingly underrepresented in her next two outings, in the limp thrillers Fair Game and Fled, Hayek's performances nevertheless provided much-needed zip for both projects, and 1997 found her nicely romantically matched in both Fools Rush In and TNT's adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which she portrayed Esmerelda to Mandy Patinkin's Quasimodo. Starring opposite Antonio Banderas in the now cult classic Desperado which put her on Hollywood's map. The moviegoers proved to be as dazzled with Hayek as he had been. After her break, she was cast again by Rodriguez to star in his From Dusk Till Dawn. Although her vampy role opposite George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino was a small one, it was a good credit to her box office name. Hayek continued to rise her star in both commercial and artistic films. Salma Hayek Internet shrines cropped up like weeds, starred alongside Matthew Perry in the 1997 romantic comedy, Fools Rush In. That same year, Hayek charmed audiences with her role as Esmeralda in a TNT rendition of The Hunchback of Notre Dame simply called Hunchback.

Hayek's film repertoire continued to expand, with a role as a cocaine-sniffing dancer in 54, based on the rise and fall of the popular '70s nightclub. She also starred opposite Jordana Brewster and Elijah Wood in 1998's teen slasher flick, The Faculty (also a Robert Rodriguez film), alongside Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in 1999's controversial Dogma, and opposite Kevin Kline and Will Smith in 1999's big budget disappointment, Wild Wild West.

In 2000, Salma kept busy with roles in Timecode, Chain of Fools, and she had a brief uncredited appearance in the Oscar-winning Traffic. After a role in 2001's Hotel, Hayek starred in the made-for-TV movie In the Time of the Butterflies.

The new millennium started out quietly around Salma as she was preparing to produce and star in her dream role. The role was that of Frida Kahlo, The legendary Mexican painter whom Salma had been admiring her entire life and whose story she wanted to bring to the big screen ever since her arrival in Hollywood. It finally happened in 2002. Frida, co-produced by Hayek, was a beautifully made film overflowing with passion and enthusiasm with terrific

 performances from Salma and Alfred Molina as Kahlo's cheating husband Diego Rivera. On the side was an entourage of stars including Antonio Banderas, Ashley Judd, Geoffrey Rush, Edward Norton and Valeria Golino.