Salma Hayek is featured in the new issue of Elle magazine with Nicole Kidman on the cover. We will have scans of the issue soon. You can already read the article here and check out the stunning image to your left. By the way, it seems that Salma did not attend the 15th Annual Elle Magazine’s Women in Hollywood Tribute as we have not been able to find any images of her from the event – unfortunately.

“Everyone has to find their own path, but this worked for me. I survived Hollywood—not only survived it but reinvented it for myself. Nobody thought I was going to last this long!”

Salma Hayek didn’t settle for being one of the most formidable bilingual sirens in Hollywood—she added powerhouse producer and director to a list of assets that keeps on growing

Salma Hayek was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Frida, the first Latina to be so favored, but even that doesn’t do her justice. If they gave out a statuette to the woman who has lately imprinted herself most indelibly in film and television, she’d be a shoo-in. America Ferrera remembers Hayek, a personal idol whom she’d never met, buttonholing her in the lobby of an L.A. hotel to sell her on playing the title role in a TV comedy series Hayek was trying to get off the ground: Ugly Betty. “It was a great pitch,” Ferrera says, “and it was all standing up. She didn’t even buy me a drink!” Adds Hayek’s good friend Penélope Cruz, “Salma could become the next Sherry Lansing if she wants to.”

Only Hayek could have imagined her own ascension to industry triple-threat status—actress, producer, director. She was already in her early twenties when she left telenovela stardom in Mexico to start over in Hollywood, an astounding leap of faith for a young woman, even a voluptuously beautiful one, who was short (5′2″) and who spoke broken English with an accent that studio executives worried would remind everyone in the business of their Mexican maids. She took what was available, bringing a saucy intelligence to the stock figure of the Latina spitfire, playing three of them for director Robert Rodriguez alone, including the pistolero-wielding bookstore owner in Desperado, the 1995 film that launched her in the States. “I love acting,” Hayek says with a dramatic sigh, “but I don’t take myself very seriously sometimes, and I also have a vision that goes beyond the limitations of what you can do as an actor.”

Her way out of the ethnic-kitten-with-a-whip routine was Frida, the 2002 biopic of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo that presented Hayek with a subject as cerebral, imperious, and work-obsessed as Hayek dared to think she could be. The film, which she produced and starred in, made her and almost killed her. “By the time I got the movie on its feet,” she says, “sometimes they had to put makeup on me with oxygen on my face. And I fainted a couple of times.” So how does Hayek top that? Whoops, wrong question. “No, I’m not ambitious in that linear way,” she scolds. “I already did that. Next! Besides, Frida took eight years. I’m 41, too old for that now!” The solution was her makeover into media mogul. She directed the Emmy-winning TV movie The Maldonado Miracle (2003) and, with leading lady Ferrera securely in tow, produces the oft-awarded and quite wonderful Ugly Betty. The latest project to get her creative juices flowing is a pilot for a reality TV show about weddings, her enthusiasm undimmed by the recent termination of her own engagement to French billionaire businessman Francois-Henri Pinault, the father of her child. “I saw this show in my mind,” she says. “And I think it’s very cool, that one.” Hayek is proud of her production companies (one for film, one for television) and likens them to “a well-oiled machine,” but she credits her one year- old daughter, Valentina, with making a good businesswoman better. “I was a workaholic and a control freak,” she says. “I thought that’s what kept it going. But once that baby was born, I wanted to do nothing but stare at her. I realized I could step outside the business and do a lot less but a lot more effectively.”

With this newfound passion for time management, the acting career has been downsized but not forgotten. In Paul Weitz’s upcoming Cirque du Freak, Hayek plays a psychic, circus bearded lady who falls in love with a vampire (you heard right). As for the vicissitudes of her own romantic life, she says, with a singsong delivery worthy of a ’30s cinema glamour queen, “Someone else might come, no one else might come, I don’t know. But whatever is going to happen, it’s going to be good.”

ELLE: Is your career path one that younger actresses might emulate—directing and producing so you’re not at the mercy of others?
SH: Everyone has to find their own path, but this worked for me. I survived Hollywood—not only survived it but reinvented it for myself. Nobody thought I was going to last this long!
ELLE: After Frida, did you have the sense that Hollywood looked at you as a woman with power?
SH: I think people developed a different kind of respect for me. That doesn’t mean it made me more powerful. Power in this town is really relative. I’ve seen people who think they have power, and it lasts one year. I was powerful when I first arrived here and didn’t even have a green card because I had taken the step to continue to grow and learn.
ELLE: Growing up, were you inspired by any American movies?
SH: One that made me love all this was Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. I realized there was a place where you could make rivers out of chocolate and you could chew gum and fly. A place where you could take reality and bend it, turn it into anything you can imagine.