IT’S only on meeting Eva Longoria that you realise just how good an actress she really is. As Gabrielle Solis in Channel 4’s hit show
Desperate Housewives, Eva plays a selfish sex kitten with an insatiable appetite for wealth. The reality is very different — apart from the sex kitten bit.Recently engaged to basketball player Tony Parker, Eva is clearly as bemused by her rapid rise to stardom as she is excited by it. There is a genuine enthusiasm about the 31-year-old that is infectious.
Just a few years ago she was a little known soap actress with a series of parts in daytime shows including The Bold and The Beautiful and The Young and The Restless. Then she landed the role of the rich and spoiled Gabrielle on Wisteria Lane.
She now has a lucrative $1 million modelling contract as the face of L’Oréal make-up and skincare, has been voted No.1 on a popular men’s magazine’s ‘Hot 100’ list for two years running and has starred in films with Michael Douglas, Kiefer Sutherland and Christian Bale.
Not bad for an ugly duckling.
“When I was growing up, my family called me ‘la prieta fea’, which means ‘ugly dark one’ — that was my nickname,” she says. “So when people call me a sex icon, it’s flattering but it never goes to my head because I never felt sexy as a teenager. I was a tomboy and any time anyone says something about me being hot, it makes me giggle.
“I didn’t grow up wanting this at all. I was working as an aerobics instructor when I won a scholarship to come to Los Angeles to compete in a modelling and talent competition and was amazed when I won it. I had never acted before in my life and yet I won the acting category. I thought, ‘I wonder what this is about, let’s see what happens’. That was nine years ago.”
The youngest of four sisters, Eva was raised on a ranch in Texas. Her mother was a special needs teacher, her father an army engineer. An athletic teenager, she went to university, with plans to become a sports trainer and got a degree in exercise science and kinesiology (the study of muscular movement).
“I had a happy childhood but we worked hard. We washed our clothes in the lake. We were very in touch with nature and my dad would take us on three day hikes and show us how to live off the land, how to survive and that gave us a great foundation.
“When my sisters read the magazines, they still laugh and say, ‘They can’t be talking about you, they must have the wrong person’.
“I mean it. I really did grow up feeling ugly and boys were not at all interested in me. I was the only one in the family born with black hair and dark skin. I was skin and bones and I was clumsy. My sisters were blonde with hazel eyes like my mom, so everybody thought I was adopted. People would come up to my mom and go, ‘Oh my, your daughters are beautiful . . . and who’s this?’
“I certainly didn’t depend on my looks because I wasn’t pretty. I always knew I was going to have to work hard, that nothing was going to be handed to me and I think that came from my mum and dad.”
Also helping to give her the reality check that those in the public eye are often in need of is Eva’s relationship with her eldest sister Lisa.
The 37-year-old is mentally handicapped and was the inspiration behind a foundation called Eva’s Heroes, which was launched in November of last year. It aims to raise money for the mentally and physically disabled.
“My sister is the brightest light of my family’s life,” says Eva, poignantly. “Hers is the face I want to see first when I go home.
“As children, we always knew that she came first because she had special needs and we were taught from when we were babies to respect and understand that.
“So you appreciate how important it is to think of someone else first. As a child, it was always, ‘Is Lisa going to be OK? Will Lisa have fun?’ And I think that definitely moulds you into an awareness of the opportunities you have that she doesn’t have and can never have.
“That’s why it’s easy not to get carried away with the hysteria of being in a show like Desperate Housewives. Sometimes it’s hard to deal with when I’m out shopping at the supermarket, but I can’t complain. I still can’t understand why anyone cares about what I do or what I say.
“I went to a photo shoot the other day and there were paparazzi outside and we pulled up and I said, ‘Wow, who’s here?’ And they said ‘You!’
“The success of the show has just blown me away, really. I guess people will always be interested in relationships and infidelity and everything connected to things in their own lives.
“We don’t try to shock as much as draw attention to the pent-up frustrations women have to deal with — there’s a lot of satire and black humour and we deal with the basic problems facing married women.
“With it being a group of us I feel like I am part of the Beatles at times but you can’t believe your own hype. You’ll soon be let down if you blow yourself up. I won’t stop going to the supermarket just because the paparazzi follow me there. I love to cook and a cook needs her ingredients.”
Of Mexican descent, Eva is far more the handy housewife than the character she plays.
She says she would like 10 children and, unlike the money-grabbing Mrs Solis, she would never marry someone just for their money.
In January 2002 Eva married Tyler Christopher, an actor with a similar career in daytime soaps as Eva had pre-Wisteria Lane.
The marriage lasted a day short of two years with the beautiful actress admitting now it was a mistake as she was too young.
It certainly hasn’t put her off getting hitched again, though. Eva and her fiancé, Tony, plan to marry in France this summer in what they describe as a big, happy ceremony with lots of family and friends.
“I’m really looking forward to it,” says Eva. “Last time I was too young and eloped to Las Vegas. This time I’d love to have a big wedding and do it properly.
“I’m definitely no Bridget Jones. I don’t believe in that whole ‘Oh, there are no decent men out there’ thing. Get real, girls — there are loads of gorgeous guys on every street corner.”
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