PORTRAIT OF A TEMPTRESS

The upcoming biopic Frida , starring Salma Hayek, deals with the many
love affairs of famous Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, including her
dangerous liaison with exiled Russian Communist, Leon Trotsky, played
by Australian Geoffrey Rush.

But Rush's key role is not the only Australian interest in this
long-awaited film about one of the 20th century's most sexually
adventurous and daringly artistic women.

Frida, just released in the United States and due to begin its
Melbourne run on Boxing Day, opened the Venice Film Festival in
September with a standing ovation.

The movie tells of Kahlo's marriage to communist artist Diego Rivera.
Their love was potent, but so was his appetite for other women. At one
stage he slept with her younger sister, a betrayal symbolised in a new
London play, La Casa Azul, with the passing of Kahlo's dress between
the two siblings.

In the past two decades - mainly since Hayden Herrera's 1983 biography
Frida - Kahlo has become a mono-browed pin-up for the feminist
movement. The art world's Sylvia Plath. The new film and play strive
to capture the woman behind the legend: the impassioned artist, the
demanding invalid, the insecure wife - and the bi-sexual adultress.

Kahlo also had a close friendship with legendary Tasmanian-born screen
swashbuckler, Errol Flynn.

Flynn gave only vague details of his brief, but memorable stay at
Kahlo's house in his autobiography My Wicked Wicked Ways, and made no
mention of having had romantic contact with her.

They met in late 1935 when Frida, the talented artist of Mexican and
German parentage, was 28 and still married to Rivera, then 49. Both
were having many affairs and Kahlo had just discovered that Rivera had
slept with her sister. Flynn, then 26, and his future first wife, the
Mexican actress Lili Damita, visited the Rivera home in Mexico City in
the company of another beautiful Mexican actress, Dolores Del Rio, a
highly paid Hollywood star. Mexico's top star, Salma Hayek, had been
trying for seven years to play Kahlo before finally receiving the go
ahead last year.

Damita and Del Rio were lauded for their glamour, but Kahlo clearly
dressed to catch Flynn's attention, as evidenced in his rapturous
description: "My excitement increased when in walked Rivera's young
wife. What a beauty she was. With long raven hair, piercing eyes,
beautiful mouth, and a figure draped exotically in a Mexican zarape,
like a bath towel a girl wraps around under her armpits.

Only the zarape she wore was so flimsy you could see through it, and
she wore nothing underneath."

Flynn admitted he got high smoking Rivera's home-grown marijuana while
the women were hitting the tequila. Still under the influence, Flynn
bumped into Kahlo again: "(She) now wore a violently coloured robe off
the shoulder ... There was a small red bow at the back of her neck
around the fluent length of hair, and then the raven mane dipped
downward like a black snake to the cleavage of her buttocks. I stared
... all was exotic."

Eighteen months later, the gaunt, middle-aged Russian exile Trotsky -
hardly in Flynn's class in the looks department - arrived in Mexico
with his wife, and Kahlo quickly began her famous affair with him.

Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution, had been
banished from Russia by his arch rival, Stalin, in 1929, and then was
forced to roam the world seeking asylum to avoid Stalin-backed assassins.

Rivera, then an admirer of Trotsky, persuaded Mexico's President
Cardenasto to let the exile in, and when Trotsky and his wife Natalia
showed up in January 1937, Rivera and Kahlo were waiting to greet them.

Kahlo let the couple stay in her family's old home, the famous Blue
House of Meaghan Delahunt's novel.

Kahlo's clandestine affair with Trotsky was extremely dangerous and
lasted several months before they both agreed to end it, fearing
Rivera and the Mexican authorities would find out and have him
deported. There was also the constant fear of an assassination attempt.

Trotsky was eventually murdered in August 1940 by Stalinist agent
Ramon Mercador, using an alpine climbing axe, and Kahlo, who had met
Mercador in Paris a year earlier, was briefly under suspicion.
Although she was famous in Mexico, she was interrogated at length by
investigating police before convincing them of her innocence.

After World War II ended in 1945, exhibitions of Kahlo's daring and
highly emotional paintings made her almost as famous as her husband.
But she suffered from ill health most of her adult life as the result
of severe injuries received in a bus crash when she was a teenager,
and she had to have a leg amputated a year before her death in 1954.

It is not surprising that it has taken so long for a feature film to
be made of her life because her lifelong communist leanings would have
made conservative Hollywood studio heads somewhat reluctant to finance
such a project.

Mexico's top star, Salma Hayek, had been trying for seven years to
play Kahlo before finally receiving the go ahead last year.

With the help of special make-up, especially Kahlo's famous trademark
thick connecting eyebrows, she has an amazing physical resemblance to
the Mexican artist, and even appears in the movie with Kahlo's wispy
hair above the upper lip.

Kahlo was by no means embarrassed by her unibrow - on the contrary,
she defiantly emphasised it in her numerous self-portraits. Publicity
photos of the movie Frida, showing Hayek made-up with the unibrow,
have ignited memories of Hollywood's famous unibrowed actor Tyrone
Power, who was ordered by 20th Century Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck to
have his eyebrows drastically trimmed and separated before he could
make his screen debut.

Hayek, 36, a former soap opera star in Mexico, made her breakthrough
in Hollywood in 1995 in Desperado, and is now regarded as the most
successful Mexican star since the 1930s when Del Rio was landing all
the Latino glamour roles.

Fortunately, she has managed to beat both Jennifer Lopez and Madonna
to bring the Kahlo story to the screen.

"It is only right and proper that the role of Frida in this movie is
played by a Mexican," she said in a recent interview. "In a way, Frida
was very much like Mexico - her body may have been broken, but her
soul was indestructible."

Moonlight Cinema, in the Royal Botanic Gardens, opens its season
tomorrow with the Australian premiere of Frida. It opens elsewhere on
Boxing Day.