‘You remind Americans of their maids, Salma’

SUCCESS means different things to different people.

For Salma Hayek, it was a stranger attacking her with a purse halfway through dinner.

It was late 1989, and Hayek, then 23, had just won the title role in ,a Mexican soapie, that was watched by about 70% of the country’s population.

“Suddenly – pow!” she says. “This woman is hitting me with her purse and screaming, ‘You horrible girl! How dare you defy your mother like that!?’”

Hayek’s real mother, sitting beside her, was momentarily puzzled, until it became clear their fellow diner was talking about some fictional transgression carried out on-screen the previous evening.

Twenty-six years on (Hayek turns 50 this year), there is still an impish twinkle about her.

her new film from Italy’s Matteo Garrone, is a strange, sumptuous fairy-tale triptych culled from the writings of the 17th-century Neapolitan poet Giambattista Basile.

It stars Hayek as a childless queen who falls pregnant after eating the heart of a sea-dragon. (Hayek and her husband, the French luxury goods billionaire François-Henri Pinault became parents to daughter Valentina in 2007, presumably via more conventional means.)

In one memorable scene, we see Hayek at the head of a bone-coloured banqueting table, cheeks sauced with blood, tearing chunks out of the giant organ with her teeth.

“I’ll never know what it was made of,” she says ruefully. “They would only say ‘many things, but you’re not allergic to them’.”

And Garrone wanted multiple takes: one expressing desperation, another profound sadness, another hope, another disgust, another the first glimmers of love for the unborn child this monstrous rite is planting inside her.

The three fables in the film, she says, each revolve around women: one in which Hayek’s infertile monarch bears a son, another in which a wizened old maid is magically changed into a flawless sylph, and a third in which a young princess has a husband chosen for her via a bizarre competition of her father’s devising.

“These are women’s obsessions: motherhood, keeping our youth, finding the right man,” she says.

“And in the end, they all come down to the same thing: our capacity for love. So a woman eating a heart? It’s what we do all our lives.”

Hayek is a Hollywood star of two decades’ standing – her big break came in the 1995 action western

and she was nominated for the best actress Oscar in 2003 for playing the artist Frida Kahlo in the biopic – but the actress says she encountered a lot of prejudice when she first arrived in Los Angeles.

“I had things said to me that you would not believe,” she says.

Mexican actresses were good for playing temptresses and housekeepers, but not much else.

She recalls an executive at a major studio once telling her she would struggle to find leading roles because “the moment you open your mouth, you remind everyone of their maid”.

“They would consider me for prostitute, but never lead prostitute,” she says.

Hayek recalls sitting in her apartment with a rail of designer clothes but no money for food.

It’s no coincidence that her first major English-speaking role came via Robert Rodriguez, a Mexican-American director.

That’s why Donald Trump’s characterisation of Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers during the US presidential campaign hasn’t shocked her.

“If we can find something positive about the Trump campaign, it’s that it has painted a clear picture of what America really is,” she says.

“How divided it is, and how much more racism there is than many white people expected. ”–