No special effects, she's for real

Today she is the opposite of tough: tiny and elegant, like the delicate civilian bride of a Persian prince It turns out that all of that sensuous strength came from Saldana. And here she is in front of me, and she is quite something. She was a gymnast and then a ballet dancer in her teens. It took her only six months to get her body bionic enough for her big break. “I hope you don’t mind that I’m smoking,” she says, sucking on a Marlboro Light in her suite at the Sunset Tower on Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood, which is strewn, rather deliciously, with make-up and a half-empty bottle of Veuve Clicquot in an ice bucket. The day after we meet, Saldana will be presented with the MaxMara Face of the Future award at a gala ceremony. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but it’s obviously the sort of thing that happens when you are the star of the most successful film of all time.

I’ve heard she is feisty, a tough cookie with a line on most things. Well, she is an action-movie regular: she was the young Nyota Uhura in the 2009 Star Trek reboot, and in her latest movie, The Losers, she plays a CIA operative on a mission to wreak revenge on some would-be assassins.

Today she is in a MaxMara silk shirt, leather trousers and Yves Saint Laurent shoes. She is the opposite of tough: tiny and elegant, like the delicate civilian bride of a Persian prince. “I love this,” she says with the creaminess of a voice-over for a chocolate ad, stroking the sleeve of her shirt. “I love fashion. My grandmother and great-grandmother were seamstresses, so I know fashion on an artistic level, not as labels, labels, labels. My grandmother, if she were here, would touch your dress, look at the seam. She was obsessed with buttons. She’d take off my shoes and say, ‘This is good leather, a good investment.’

Saldana comes from a Latina matriarchy. Her mother often accompanies her to events, and her sisters — Cisely and Mariel — moved to LA when she did, two years ago, because they “couldn’t bear to be apart”. She was born in New Jersey in 1978 and spent her early years in Queens, New York, but after her father died in a car accident when she was nine, her Puerto Rican mother took the brood to the Dominican Republic, his birthplace. Saldana has said of that time: “I can’t imagine what that would have been like. You build a family with someone and then, one day, they’re gone. And you look at the three kids that you’ve created. You’re a housewife, you didn’t go to college, you’ve never really worked. So she made all these amazing sacrifices.

“My mother has never followed anything but her heart. She isn’t a superhero, she’s a survivor. I mean, she doesn’t have it all together, but she doesn’t cover it up. When she was broken, she was like, ‘Sorry, guys, I’m broken. Mummy’s not having a good day.’ And it was as powerful as when Mummy was having a good day and she’d have everything solved.”

She says she remembers seeing The Terminator and wanting to be Sarah Connor, and that she always had a poster of Ripley from Aliens on her wall. “My mom says I dressed as a ninja for five Hallowe’ens.”

Some people are nervous around strong, sexual women who might just as easily knock your block off as kiss you. Has it held her back? She has said about racism in the industry: “When people go, ‘Oh, we want to go traditional with the part’, what they want to say is, ‘We want to go white.’ They have smooth ways of saying it, and the recent one is the word ‘traditional’.”

When people go, ‘Oh, we want to go traditional with the part’, what they want to say is, ‘We want to go white I tell her about a road trip I took to New Orleans last winter with her Avatar co-star, Michelle Rodriguez, a fellow Dominican/Puerto Rican action girl. “Michelle!” she squawks. “You’re so lucky you did that. I love Michelle. Michelle’s truthful, she’s pure. What you see is what you’re gonna get. Michelle is a soldier. Is Saldana a soldier too? “I guess I’m a role model now, and that is a privilege. I think women were fighting because we wanted to be feminine. Then we had to be masculine. Now we just wanna be us.

Saldana has been with the same boyfriend for 10 years, the entrepreneur Keith Britton. They met when she was starting out as an actress and he was a model.

Rumour has it that they’re setting up — or she’s bankrolling — some sort of web-based fashion venture, but she never speaks about him to the press.

Does she believe in, um, everlasting love? “Yes, but define love,” she says, slithering away from the question as craftily as a politician. “You love to eat, you love sex, you love wine. You love fighting, you love, period. I’ve met a few people who don’t have enough love and they’re scary. I really hope they find someone to love.

It’s the following evening, and a group of us is ferried to the 2010 Women in Film Crystal Lucy awards, a dinner for 850 Hollywood power players. Courteney Cox is there, with Jennifer Aniston, Laura Dern, Emily Blunt, Sally Field and Debra Messing. It’s a proper A-list girls’ love-in. The theme is “a new era”, which a big-wig talent agent sitting on my right is kind enough to explain is about “women in Hollywood entering a new period of mutual support”.

Saldana is sitting at the best table in the house, right in front, with her mother on one side and her boyfriend on the other. Would she have been invited a year ago? And then a touching thing happens. Saldana collects her award, then Courteney Cox goes up to accept hers. “Thank you, Women in Film,” says Cox. “And you,” she says, looking at Saldana, “are gorgeous. For real.”