Mexican new wave

Salma Hayek is big in Mexico City. Literally so. Along Revolución and Insurgentes her image on rooftop billboards doubles the height of apartment blocks, exhorting chilangos, as the capital's citizens are known, to get the hell out and head for her home town, Vera Cruz.

But chilangos can live with that. For Hayek, fending off competition from Madonna and Jennifer Lopez, has finally managed to put one of their heroes - Frida Kahlo, the most important woman painter of the 20th century - on the screen.

Born in the suburb of Coyoacán in 1907, Kahlo's life was a litany of pain. Aged six, she caught polio and acquired a permanent limp. Aged 18, her right leg and pelvis were wrecked in a bus crash. Crippled for life, she never had children. "I suffered two serious accidents in my life," she said. "One in which a streetcar knocked me down ... the other is Diego."

She met the painter Diego Rivera when, in 1922, she was one of the first females to be admitted to the prestigious National Preparatory School where he was painting a mural. The following year he included her in one of the murals he was creating at the Public Education Secretariat. They met again in 1928, just after Rivera's second marriage had broken up. A year later, in August 1929, they married.

The couple spent the early 1930s in America, Rivera creating murals in San Francisco, New York and Detroit, Kahlo engaged on a series of self-portraits. "I paint myself," she said, "because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best." She treats herself more cruelly than nature in many of them, joining her eyebrows completely, darkening, hair by hair, a moustache on her upper lip.

By 1933 they were back in Mexico City, settled into the cuboid studio Rivera had built not far from the Kahlo family home. Within a year he had begun an affair with Frida's younger sister Cristina. Kahlo's reaction was to embark on a series of relationships with both men and women. One of her lovers was Leon Trotsky, to whom the couple gave refuge when Stalin forced him to flee Russia.

In 1939, shortly after the affair with Trotsky, Kahlo and Rivera divorced but a year later they remarried. The physical pain continued however and Kahlo underwent more than 30 operations. In 1953 her right leg was amputated. Later that year, wheelchair-bound, she had her first one-woman show, the only one in her native country in her lifetime. She died in 1954.

"Who wants to see a movie about a Mexican lesbian in a wheelchair?" a Hollywood honcho reacted when Hayek pitched the project. The film made by Miramax and widely tipped for an Oscar when it is released late this year, is Hayek's triumphant response.

As for those billboards, most of the rooftop advertising of Mexico City, has, it transpires, been erected illegally and the mayor is busy tearing it down. That, though, won't stop chilangos finding Hayek's portrait of Kahlo a new reason to go large on the girl from Vera Cruz.

Way to go

Sean Hignett flew to Mexico City with British Airways (0845 7733377), three flights a week, returns from £540. He stayed at the five-star Hotel Nikko (0052 5280 1111), in the upmarket Polanco area, handy for museums and designer shops. Doubles from £200 per night.

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