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Eva Mendes reprises a role made famous by Joan Crawford. Photo: Reuters

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Eva Mendes on top

Tim Elliott | August 24, 2008 - 12:00AM

UNBEKNOWN to my wife, I have been seeing Eva Mendes for some years now, always in private, of course, precious moments snatched on a Sunday morning or late at night; Eva and I in bed reading aloud to one another, or Eva, mowing the lawn in her favourite palm-tree print .

The 34-year-old actor and model is soon to arrive in Sydney, where she will co- host September's 30 Days Of Fashion And Beauty, but I doubt we'll be hooking up. Recently she revealed to the press her love for some schmuck movie producer called George Gargurevich, who she claimed she had been with for six years. Hussy.

It's said that the screen vixen was one of the first Westerners to understand karmic energy, that she took all the lustful male thoughts directed her way and cultivated them like a garden. If West was right, Mendes could have by now grown not just a garden but her own rooftop nature reserve, 200-hectare private rainforest and tropical island retreat in the Bahamas.

With her caramel complexion, Raquel-Welch-hair and liberally ventilated cleavage, the resident has been unleashing her highly flammable sex appeal on unsuspecting males ever since first appearing in music videos in the mid-1990s. Esquire magazine pronounced her Sexiest Woman in the World in 2003; she regularly features in Maxim's Most Beautiful list and has long been an international spokeswoman for Revlon Cosmetics.

Come October, she will star in what is being touted as her breakthrough role - a husband-stealing shop girl in - alongside , and Candice Bergen.

It's her work in a recent television commercial, though, that has got most tongues wagging. The ad, for Calvin Klein's Secret Obsession perfume, shows a naked Mendes writhing about on a bed and features an unscheduled appearance by her left nipple. US television networks, shocked and appalled by the nipple's cameo, immediately banned the ad, prompting a thoroughly predictable backlash.

"This country is so messed up," the ad's creative director, Fabien Baron, says. "It's such a joke and it's quite upsetting, frankly, how hypocritical this country has become. It's OK for children to see people killed by guns? Spreading a little love right now would be a good idea."

Mendes agrees. "I love it," she told journalists. "The ads are totally Calvin, totally

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provocative and a little controversial."

Despite her looks, there is something refreshingly unscripted about Mendes, a candid and thoroughly appealing disregard for political correctness. She has a talk- first-think-later approach that she applies to everything from her own acting ability ("I'm no "), to cosmetic surgery ("When the time comes, I'm going to nip and tuck it all"). Asked what she looks for in a man, she laughs: "Brains, because I lack them." She also has an unlikely tomboyishness: clips of her farting, then bursting into hysterics, are big hits on YouTube.

Born in Miami, Mendes is the youngest of four children of Cuban parents - and the only one in the family born in the US. Her father was a car salesman; her mother an accountant. When she was 10, her parents divorced and she moved to Los Angles to be raised by her mother in the then working-class neighbourhood of Silver Lake. "It was a big, old, loud, obnoxious Cuban family," she told Marie Claire magazine. "I was raised by parents who didn't have much. We didn't use whole pieces of paper towel. We shared or used rags. Mom didn't even want us flushing all the time."

She dreamed of having money - enough, she wrote to her mum as a nine-year-old girl, "to take care of all your bills and ... pick you up a limousine". Raised a Catholic, she considered becoming a nun, until her older sister explained that nuns didn't get paid. ("Then I went off the idea really quickly.") After school, she entertained thoughts of doing art history, but eventually enrolled in marketing at California State University, Northridge.

Acting had never been a priority. Rather, "it fell into my lap, after a neighbour took pictures of me and showed them to an agent". Mendes soon found work in commercials and music videos, including the clip for 's Miami, and the ' Se A Vida E, the dramaturgical demands of which might best be described as minimal. In 's 1996 video Hole In My Soul, Mendes played a kind of Franken-babe character who is created in a lab and emerges, literally smouldering, from a giant test-tube wearing nothing but an American-flag bikini. "Pure class," she admits. "I was so embarrassed."

Mendes was at university when she landed her first film role, in the 1998 direct-to- video Children Of The Corn V: Fields Of Terror. Her performance was "awful" and the film "a disaster" but Mendes persisted, enlisting esteemed acting coach Ivan Chubbuck and embarking on a gruelling round of auditions and cattle calls, "changing in the back seats of cars" and sustaining herself on a diet of "49 cent tacos".

The cheap tacos came to an abrupt end in 2001, however, with her small but pivotal part in the award-winning , where she played the girlfriend of

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Denzel Washington's bent-cop character, Alonzo Harris. Mendes's performance brought her considerable notoriety, not least because she admitted to reporters that she had taken to carrying a blade and mace. ("I was young and stupid," she later explains. "It was my little Angelina Jolie stage, like I was really tough.")

Other films followed: Stuck On You, Once Upon A Time In Mexico, the romantic comedy Hitch, starring opposite Will Smith, and James Gray's We Own The Night, with and . Thanks to movies such as Exit Wounds, and Ghost Rider, where she decapitates a demon with a blast from a shotgun, Mendes began to be seen as that most suspect of things - a guy's girl, someone who stars principally in films for, and about, dudes. And dudes don't tune in for the acting.

For a woman who claims to have once walked out of a rap video because they wanted her to wear hotpants, this came as an unwelcome development. For all the fun, candour and freestyle farting, Mendes wants to be regarded as a real actor. Which is why The Women matters so much.

"It's all women in the cast," she says, visibly proud of the fact that there is not one man in the film - and, indeed, no guns, exploding cars or rabid demons that need their heads shot off.

A remake of the 1939 classic, The Women revolves around a cosy clique of socialites: part-time designer Mary Haines (Meg Ryan), women's magazine editor Sylvia Fowler (Annette Bening), full-time mum Edith Potter () and writer Miriam Aarons (). Into this tight-knit group is thrown a human hand grenade called Crystal Allen (Mendes), a Saks department store perfume girl who, we soon learn, has had an affair with Haines's husband.

"It was such a fun comedy to make," says Mendes, whose shop-girl role was played in the original by Joan Crawford. "I'm going to take a lot of crap for that. But in no way did I try to be [Crawford], or mimic what she did." Instead, she explains, it's "a modern take" on the movie, with loads of relationship intrigue and "lots of fashion".

Mendes has two films pending, an action flick called The Spirit and Queen Of The South, currently in production, in which she plays a Spanish drug lord opposite Josh Hartnett and Sir Ben Kingsley. (Interestingly, Mendes's brief trip to rehab earlier this year was rumoured by some in to be a research trip for her role.) She is also filming The : Port Of Call New Orleans, starring Val Kilmer and , with cult director Werner Herzog.

All of which might indicate that Hollywood is finally ready to listen to Mendes, not just look at her.

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"It's nice to feel like people are appreciating your work," she says. "But I don't base how I feel about myself on reviews or what people write. My self-esteem isn't derived from what Hollywood thinks of me."

All the attention, the press and the magazines, "all the best-dressed or the worst- dressed," she laughs, "that's like the extra stuff."

Additional reporting by Maggie Ryan

Eva Mendes arrives in Sydney on Thursday. The Women is out in October.

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