Like her dark beauty, Eva Mendes’s Cuban roots are discovered in a jiffy. The actress has developed a solid career, although she still has to achieve a leading role that will give her main status.

Eva Mendes was born in Miami, Florida, United States, on March 5, 1974, although her family comes from Cuba, and she is very proud of her origins, as evidenced by her perfect command of Spanish. She was educated in Los Angeles, and already in high school she became fond of acting. But she would later take classes in a more professional way with Ivana Chubbuck.

Training Day (Training Day) was the film that Mendes needed to get out of the gray race in which he was mired. As she herself pointed out to me, “when they put this film on television I feel very proud because, for me, it was the beginning of everything. I had been acting for two years, I was doing about five auditions a day and I saw that I was not getting anywhere; and I was about to leave it, when they offered me that role”. She further admits to a special debt of gratitude to her co-star Denzel Washington , “Within two minutes she gave me the faith she needed to think ‘this is what I want to do.'”

But before this, the year of odysseys, 2001, she had to take on roles as a cute and screaming girl in horror and action by-products, such as Children of the Corn. Fields of Terror , Urban Legend 2 and Open Wound , the latter with a Steven Seagal in low hours. She also appeared briefly in a chapter of the television series Urgencias , credited as Eva Méndez, which reveals her Hispanic origin.

After Training Day , Mendes joined action sagas where she was an effective secondary, Robert Rodríguez’s El mexicano (2003), and Full throttle 2 (2002). In addition to being pretty, Mendes gives off a sympathy in these titles that immediately won over the viewer. She was thus understood by the Farrelly brothers, who recruited her for the comedy Stuck on You , along with Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear . The actress was beginning to become the girl in the movie, the love interest of the protagonist or protagonists.

An important title in his filmography is Hitch (2005), where he works with the megastar Will Smith , an expert adviser on matters of the heart, except for his own. Also a megastar was his ‘partner’ Nicolas Cage in Ghost Rider (2007), an adaptation of a comic. He would repeat himself in the world of the cartoon with The Spirit (2008), although his role was not very important, and the film based on the character of Will Eisner failed, even having Frank Miller himself behind the camera . And with Cage he would share shots again in Corrupt Lieutenant (2009), a crime film by German Werner Herzog .

Mendes wants to work, and has been in ensemble films such as Ellas & ellos (2005), and The Women (2008), a remake of George Cukor ‘s film Mujeres , where she was a bit of a harpy. This last film was the opportunity to work with established actresses, such as Meg Ryan , Annette Bening and Bette Midler . She was also, a bit of a troupe, in the police thriller La noche es nuestra (2007).

It is clear that Eva must overcome the tendency for many to see her only as a sexy actress, who serves to “adorn” a movie. Is she capable of supporting the weight of a movie by herself? The adaptation of “La reina de los mares del Sur”, a novel by Arturo Pérez Reverte, could have been a good opportunity to verify this, but for the moment that project is quite stagnant. So we will have to settle for waiting for his next titles, Last Night –where he is, along with Keira Knightley and Sam Worthington , the third in discord in a love triangle–, The Other Guys –a detective comedy, with Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell –, and the Southbound border, where he works alongside Matthew McConaughey .