`The hottest thing in Hollywood right now is probably me and a pig called Baby' says Spanish actor Antonio Banderas. Sarah Gristwood marks the arrival of a new, lusty generation of Latinos on the silver screen
NO I don't think there's a boom in Latino cinema," said Spike Lee recently.
"It's just that Antonio Banderas is in every single film at the moment. How many pictures can this guy do?"
But if American cinema is to reflect the country's demographics, how far away can a Latino boom be?
Spanish language films - low-budget, from across the border - have always been around in quantity. The 198Os saw a handful of independent American projects such as Stand And Deliver, La Bamba, El Norte. More recently we saw Mi Vida Loca and the Puerto Rican half of Hangin' With The Homeboys. But few of the players have made the breakthrough to the mainline, high-profile Hollywood industry.
It's a long time since the Sharks and the Jets fought it out West Side Story, and the last time Hollywood really went overboard for a Latino actor was probably in the 193Os, heyday of Ramon Novarro (forget Valentino, who was Italian-born). In the next five decades we had Carmen Miranda dressed as a fruit salad, Cesar Romero and Rita Moreno. Anthony Quinn half-Mexican and half-Irish - was co-opted as an all-purpose exotic a long time ago.
More recently, there has been Raul Julia, Lou Diamond Phillips, Edward James Olmos, and Jimmy Smits, who is still best known for television (reaction time to the world outside is always quicker on TV).
But you run out of names all too quickly. And as Rosie Perez, a rare female candidate, puts it: "The industry still makes a big misrepresentation as to what Hispanics are. The rich they show as Castilian, the poor as Mexican-Indian, straight out of Geronimo."
Enter the Cuban-born Andy Garcia, who came to fame as Al Pacino's successor in The Godfather Part III - an ironic piece of casting considering he's Hispanic. It is the high visibility of so many Italian actors that has probably helped to mask the lack of a Hispanic presence. Think of Scarface, in 1983, when the film-maker resorted to casting the Italian Pacino as the Cuban refugee.
But five years after The Godfather III, Garcia remains pessimistic. "The industry typecasts everyone and the straitjacket is tighter for the Latin actor. At first I couldn't even get auditioned once people saw the surname.
Garcia has done more than most to take the Latin actor beyond the moustached villain. But it's ironic that Antonio Banderas - just four years on from having to read his lines in The Mambo Kings phonetically - should be so much more confident about the shift in priorities in contemporary US cinema. "There are many more Spanish in America than in my own country," he says.
Since leaving his wife for Melanie Griffith - with whom he appears regularly in Hello! magazine - he would seem to have lost a good deal of credibility. (Melanie Griffith? Uh-oh, Antonio.) On the other hand, a flurry of more or less downmarket films is probably gaining him commercial value. Desperado, in which he has his first American leading role, is a film with a foot in either camp a big-budget remake of a low-cost Latino hit. Director Robert Rodriguez spent $7 million on it, compared with the $7,000 cost of his gangster flick El Mariachi, which was made without any stars.
"The only way Latinos can get into Hollywood," says Rodriguez, at 23 the highest-profile Hispanic director around, "is by making our own movies."
The plot is minimal but it evolves around a chain of impressive set pieces, reflecting Rodriguez's theory, born of long evenings with his best buddy Quentin Tarantino, that in the future, movies will be skipped through for the favourite bits, just as one flicks through TV programmes with the remote control.
The film is violent and youth-oriented, but the camera positively caresses Banderas's Renaissance angel face.
Antonio Banderas is slowly being moulded by the Hollywood idolotry machine. At last year's Cannes film festival, the Washington Post announced: "When Desperado comes out, Brad Pitt will be history."
Son of a policeman and a schoolteacher, Banderas began performing at 14, joining a drama school in Malaga which organised troupes of actors to tour rural villages. He was 19 when he moved to Madrid and was discovered by Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, with whom he made five films. His total filmography so far runs well over 40.
His American career began with The Mambo Kings, in which Arne Glimcher cast him beside actor Armand Assante as immigrant Cuban brothers. "There had been a migration of Spanish actors to Mexico and Argentina rather than Hollywood, traditionally," says Banderas. "I took my chance. I did have to sacrifice, go for quantity more than quality."
He was Tom Hanks's lover in Philadelphia, third vampire in Interview With The Vampire. When Banderas first went to the US, Almodovar claimed he was using only 15 per cent of his talent - "It's a price you have to pay to work in a new culture". Banderas, describes it as "a path I had to follow to get where I am this year".
And just where is that? In Buenos Aires with Madonna, actually. The long-awaited filming of Evita has finally begun in Argentina under Alan Parker. Banderas takes on the role of Che Guevara, opposite Madonna, who once made a public bid for him ("Is that man beautiful or what?") and got turned down. Che in Evita "is like Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar. A Bertolt Brecht character who winks to the audience, a critical narrator, a resume of where young Argentinians were in the 1970s," he says.
It's a plum Latino part. Progression beyond Latin roles is unlikely, though it may happen along the way. "Latin is what I am. I'm pretty proud of it. Whatever I do I'm going to be the Latin lover forever. That's my fate. Until they start saying: `He was a Latin lover' when I get old and fat and my hair is greasy."
"The hottest thing in Hollywood right now," says Banderas, "is probably me and a pig called Baby". Rodriguez puts it differently: "After seeing Antonio dancing on a table, maybe the kids won't want to be Jean-Claude Van Damme. I want people to say `Hey, I want to be Latino' - even if they aren't."