Eva Mendes

 Eva Mendes

 Eva Mendes

 Eva Mendes

 Eva Mendes

 Eva Mendes

Eva Mendes

 Eva Mendes

 Eva Mendes

 Eva Mendes

 Eva Mendes

 Eva Mendes

Born: 5 March 1974

•Birthplace: Miami, Florida

•Best Known As: Sexy Cuban-American co-star of Training Day and Hitch

After spending the last part of the 1990s in TV roles, music videos and small parts in movies such as A Night at Roxbury and Exit Wounds (both 1998), Eva Mendes had a career breakthrough co-starring with Denzel Washington in Training Day (2001). Since then she’s been one busy, sexy actor in half a dozen movies, including the car chase sequel 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003, starring Paul Walker), Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003, with Antonio Banderas and Johnny Depp), Out of Time (2003, also with Denzel Washington), the slapstick comedy Stuck on You (2003, with Matt Damon), the romantic comedy Hitch (2005, with Will Smith) and the relationship flick Trust the Man (2006, with David Duchovny). She is sometimes compared with her fellow Latinas Jennifer Lopez and Salma Hayek. Her other films include We Own the Night (2007, with Joaquin Phoenix) and Frank Miller’s film The Spirit (2008).

Mendes was born in Miami, Florida, to Cuban parents and was raised in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale by her mother after her parents’ divorce;Mendes has said that her mother “suffered so much to make my life OK” during her early years.Mendes was raised a Roman Catholic and aspired to be a nun. She is also fluent in Spanish. As a child, Mendes was teased about her “buck teeth”.

Mendes never saw herself as an actress while she was young and pursued other interests. She attended Hoover High School in Glendale and later attended California State University, Northridge to study marketing, but dropped out after wanting to begin an acting career. She studied acting under the acting teacher, Ivana Chubbuck.

In early 2008, Mendes entered a rehabilitation facility in Utah for several weeks for substance abuse problems. In a statement, her representative said that she had been “working hard for the past year and made a positive decision to take some much-needed time off to proactively attend to some personal issues that, while not critical, she felt deserved some outside professional support.”

In 2008, Mendes very pointedly broke from her co-stars of The Women by not offering support to any presidential campaign, noting that she considered her ballot preference private. After the election, she expressed disappointment at not receiving an invitation to Barack Obama’s inauguration party.

Mendes and her boyfriend, filmmaker George Augusto, have been together since 2002. “I don’t wanna have kids … I love the little suckers; they’re so cute. But I love sleep so much, and I worry about everything,” she told Marie Claire. “I feel like the institution of marriage is a very archaic kinda thing. I don’t think it fits in my world today.”