I would die if I did nothing but manicures and lunches. Hayek seems quite relaxed – it’s a nice day for a walk in the park, she says. Hayek asks very nicely: could we perhaps just have a coffee? But the attendant, who doesn’t recognise her, politely shows us the door. But it is mid-afternoon, and the place is just about to close, the cloakroom attendant explains. The Belvedere Restaurant is quiet and serene, with white tablecloths and stem vases on the tables. But she’ll show me the way, she says, leading me in the direction of a restaurant elsewhere in west London’s Holland Park, chatting merrily about nothing in particular – the weather, Milan fashion week, how she needs a coffee. Sure enough, when she arrives – tiny, radiant, swathed in cashmere, flanked by a bodyguard and an assistant who is being dragged along by Hayek’s golden labrador, Lolita – it turns out this isn’t the place she had in mind. It’s not quite somewhere I can picture Hayek – Oscar nominee, billionaire’s wife, Hollywood bombshell – hanging out, so I wait outside. It’s the kind of cafe where you queue with a plastic tray, next to a noticeboard of flyers for Monkey Music and community gardening projects, for a polystyrene cup of PG Tips with the teabag left in. And I’d watched her new film, an animation of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, aimed at families: a “passion project” that is charming, beautifully crafted, impeccably well-intentioned – but, nonetheless, could perhaps do with wearing its learning a little more lightly.Įxpecting grandeur, I am a little taken aback to arrive at the Park Cafe, appointed by Hayek’s people for our interview, to find it isn’t an ironically named smart restaurant, as I had assumed. Or at least that’s how it had always come across to me. There, she rocks a kind of boss’s wife vibe, dressed to the nines in the designer’s clothes. Because we both go to a lot of catwalk shows, I see her all the time: I’m there as a reporter, and she’s there because her husband Francois-Henri Pinault is the CEO of Kering, the luxury group that owns Gucci, Saint Laurent, Stella McCartney, Alexander McQueen and Bottega Veneta, among others. Unsisterly though it sounds, I didn’t expect to like Salma Hayek very much.
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