Part of passionate painter is actress' pet project

There were grins all around at the Frida Kahlo House in Mexico City when they heard actress Jennifer Lopez had abandoned her bid to play the iconic Mexican artist in a Hollywood biopic for United Artists.

Her rival, Mexican actress Salma Hayek, is producing and starring in her own version with Miramax. Already, she is scouting locations around Kahlo's old haunts in Coyoacan, Mexico's Bloomsbury.

"Viva Salma!" said Maite Segoviano, a frequent museum visitor and admirer of the feminist painter's work. "She is more Latina than Jennifer and so her film will be more authentic."

Hayek's co-stars include Chocolat's Alfred Molina as the husband and painter Diego Rivera; Antonio Banderas as the muralist David Siquieros; and Geoffrey Rush, best known for his Oscar-winning role in the 1996 film Shine, as Kahlo's lover, Leon Trotsky.

Director Julie Taymor took on the project after Spanish film maker Pedro Almodovar turned it down last year. Shooting is about to start.

Mexican fans have followed a year of snide exchanges between Hayek and Lopez, the Brooklyn-born star who starred as the Tex-Mex diva Selena Quintanilla in the 1997 film Selena. Lopez had boasted that with the director Luis Valdez of La Bamba and producer Francis Ford Coppola calling the shots, she would ensure that Kahlo would come across as "romantic, passionate, bisexual." She added: "I'm not afraid to look ugly."

But neither is Hayek. There are stories of her taking people aside at parties to startle them with Polaroid photos of herself in the full Frida, sporting a furry monobrow and faint moustache.

Hayek has courted Dolores Olmedo Patino, the owner of Kahlo's finest paintings, assiduously. Staff look forward to her visits to the Olmedo museum, a converted convent in Xochimilco, over-run with peacocks and hairless Aztec dogs, called xoloitzcuintlis. Some of these rare hounds are descended from the pets of Rivera and Kahlo. Authenticity will not be lacking in Hayek's production.

- INDEPENDENT