Salma Hayek’s Dyslexia: How It Became Her Advantage
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Salma Hayek is a Mexican and American actress and producer. She is best known for Frida, the 2002 film she produced and starred in. It earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.
She was also an executive producer of the TV series Ugly Betty, and she runs her own production company.
She is dyslexic, and she has been open about it for years. Her story has two hard parts: reading as a child, and learning English as an adult.
School and the hard part
Hayek was born in Coatzacoalcos, Mexico. Understood.org says she struggled with reading for much of her childhood.
The odd thing is that she was a good student. She has said she was always a fast learner. She thinks that may be why her high school did not notice her dyslexia.
She spent a short time at a boarding school in the United States, then went to college in Mexico. She left college to act, and became a star at home in the TV drama Teresa.
Then came the second hard part. In her mid-twenties she moved to Los Angeles. She spoke very little English.
She expected to pick the language up quickly. Dyslexia made it much harder than that. She has said learning English felt close to impossible at first.
When she found out
Understood.org and the University of Michigan’s DyslexiaHelp program both say Hayek was diagnosed with dyslexia as a teenager. Neither gives an exact age.
That fits with her own account. Because she learned fast in other ways, the reading trouble stayed hidden for a long time.
So she got through most of school without a name for it. She just knew that reading took her longer.
Salma Hayek’s dyslexic advantage
Hayek does not call dyslexia a gift. She does say it has shaped how she works, and that it no longer bothers her.
- Slow, deep reading. She takes her time with a script, and then it stays with her. She has pointed out that some fast readers forget the details when you ask them later.
- Memory. When she directed the TV film The Maldonado Miracle, she did not bring the script to the set. She already had it in her head. She won a Daytime Emmy for directing it.
- Working it out alone. She has said she feels lucky she did not have it easy. Having to work everything out for herself taught her a lot.
“I take a long time to read a script, but I read it only once.”
Salma Hayek, as quoted by Understood.org
Her career backs this up. She arrived in Hollywood with little English and an accent. She has listed being dyslexic among the things that were stacked against her.
She kept going anyway. She founded her own production company, Ventanarosa, in 1999. Three years later she brought Frida to the screen as both producer and star.
She became the first Mexican actress nominated for the Best Actress Oscar. That is quite a result for someone who once struggled to read a street sign in English.
What we take from it
We like Salma’s way of putting it. Slow is not the same as bad. She reads a script once, properly, and then she owns it.
Plenty of us know what it is like to be the last one to finish the page. It is nice to hear that the last one to finish can also be the one who remembers it all, and then gets the Oscar nod.