As a child in the sweltering Mexican town of Coatzacoalcos, Salma Hayek dragged her father to movie matinees every Sunday afternoon. Once inside the cool, darkened theater, she would close her eyes as the credits rolled and picture her own name in big white letters on the black screen. She dreamed of being a movie star. Celebrity did come to Hayek, though not exactly as planned. In her early 20s, she lived the high life as the star of a successful Mexican-TV soap opera. But she wasn't satisfied. "I didn't want to act in soap operas the rest of my life," she says. "I don't even watch them. I wasn't interested in [social] position but in artistic integrity." So in 1991, at age 22, she packed her bags and moved to Los Angeles with few English skills, little money and even less life experience.

After several years of polishing her English and scraping by with stereotypical "ethnic" roles, Hayek worked her way into the spotlight against all odds. Now one of the rising stars in a town that worships the blond, she is the first Mexican actress to make a splash in Hollywood since Dolores Del Rio in the 1930s.

Her success did not come without some compromises. How else would a nice girl like Hayek end up writhing around in her skivvies with a man-size python for all the world to see? The dark, hard-to-place beaut--her father is Lebanese, her mother Mexican--was pegged by the powers that be as the hot new exotic screen siren--hence the aforementioned dance of many tails in Quentin Tarantino's campy vampire flick, From Dusk Till Dawn, in which she portrayed a bloodsucking (literally) dominatrix. Not to mention the steamy nude love scene with Antonio Banderas in 1995's Desperado, which caught the eye of many a casting director.

Of course Hayek, 27, is fully aware of the dangers of typecasting. "I'm a woman, a Latin, and I have a sexy reputation. That's problematic," she says. "This industry is run by men who are surprised that you could come up with a good idea, and even if they think it's good, they say no. Machismo here is the same as machismo in Mexico."

But don't feel bad for Salma. She knows what she wants and how to get it: by not being afraid to speak out. These days she has no shortage of good ideas or new entries for her resume. In 1994 she returned to Mexico to play a nice girl turned prostitute in the much lauded El Callejon de los Milagros (Midaq Alley), a gritty low-budget production about a working-class Mexico City neighborhood. The role earned her a nomination for an Ariel, Mexico's highest film award, as best actress.

Eager to try her hand at more substantive roles in the U.S., she signed on to co-star with Russell Crowe in Breaking Up, an independent film that is almost exclusively a two-character set piece. In it she plays an unglamorous American woman stuck in a volatile relationship. Next she appears as the love interest--this time she resisted the studio's pressure for a nude scene--in Fled, an action comedy starring Stephen Baldwin and Laurence Fishburne, which opens in the U.S. this week.

Her breakthrough as a leading lady may very well come with Fools Rush In, which just wrapped. It's her first starring role in a major Hollywood production. She earned a respectable $500,000, her biggest paycheck yet, playing a young Hispanic woman from Las Vegas who finds herself pregnant after a fling with a yuppie New Yorker--Matthew Perry of the hit U.S. TV show Friends.

Though the plot is driven by the cliched notion that cultures will clash when such opposites attract, Hayek lobbied for the part for nearly three years. And once she got it, she kept on lobbying to make her portrayal personal and believable. She wanted director Andy Tennant to add a scene in which her character lights candles in church while discussing the pregnancy with her mother. Any Roman Catholic Mexican woman, argued Hayek, would talk about such an important issue with her mother. Tennant ultimately agreed. "One of Salma's charms," he says, "is that she makes you think that it's your idea."

This much is clear: Hayek doesn't want to be just another pretty face. "What Salma brings to the party is production smarts," says Tennant. "She's not just concerned with herself and her role but with the whole production. She looks at material like a studio executive, which is rare. Most actresses just aren't interested." Fools co-star Perry admits that his decision to play opposite Hayek was based primarily on a picture of her that producers showed him. "But then when we started working together," he says, "I found out she was not only beautiful, but she's also a terrific, creative actress."

Now that the rest of Hollywood is starting to figure that out, Hayek seems poised for stardom on her own terms. High on her list of goals is to get more parts, like the one in Breaking Up, that aren't expressly written for Hispanic actresses. Not that she doesn't champion her people. "My way of defending Latinos is by working and showing that we're just as good," Hayek says. "If I didn't have the blood and spirit that come from Mexico, I wouldn't be here." Dolores del Rio would be proud.

--Reported by Laura Lopez/Las Vegas