Steve Pratt discovers how Spanish actress Paz Vega managed to land a Hollywood role as a Mexican housekeeper who can't speak English when she really couldn't communicate without an interpreter herself.

SPANISH actress Paz Vega was perfectly cast as a woman who speaks no English in the new film from Terms Of Endearment and Broadcast News writer-director James L Brooks.

Like her character Flor, who becomes housekeeper to a couple and their daughter in Los Angeles, she spoke no English when she was cast in Spanglish. An additional problem was that Flor is Mexican. So she was a Spanish actress playing a Mexican woman.

The Seville-born actress is a big star in her native Spain through films including Sex And Lucia, The Other Side Of The Bed, Talk To Her and Carmen. Spanglish - which also stars Adam Sandler and Tea Leoni - marks her Hollywood debut and surely marks the start of a successful career in US movies.

Her interview with Brooks must have been fun as it was conducted through an interpreter as she spoke no English and he didn't know Spanish. Vega does speak English now, with only the occasional need for help from an interpreter.

"I knew when people eventually told me that I was one of many people seen by Jim - 100, a million, a lot of girls," she says. "At the beginning speaking no English was very good for the character. The only thing is it's my first time that I've spent so much time away from home. That for me was a problem being away from my family, my home. Apart from that, everything was great."

This was her second movie outside Spain, having already made one in France, but she finds film-making is the same all over the world. "My profession is universal," she says.

As well as the language difficulty, she had to act opposite funny man Adam Sandler, more restrained than usual as the husband in a troubled marriage. He's "a super-nice guy - all the time making jokes", she says, dodging comparisons between Latino and American men.

She does mention her husband, a businessman from Venezuela whom she married five months after meeting him on a beach on holiday. "Both are very different," she says. "My husband cries a lot. Why not? I know a lot of Latin men who cry a lot. Very soft, very sweet." She has been travelling the world promoting Spanglish in recent months, while carefully considering her next project. As for Hollywood, Vega says "it's not preferred". She wants to work everywhere and was in talks for a British movie while over here.

"Now I have the opportunity to work in Hollywood, which I think is good. To make big movies, blockbuster movies, why not? I want to make movies like serious drama. I am very open to good scripts. I am very interested to work in Latin America because it's my language," she says.

With nearly 40 million Latinos living in LA, film-movers are regarding them increasingly as an important section of the potential cinema audience. That meant there was no language barrier for Vega while filming there. "I didn't have too much time free because we work a lot every day, but I love Santa Monica. It's easy to interact with people in LA because there are a lot of Spanish people. Everyone speaks Spanish."

Vega did a lot of amateur theatre in Seville when she was young "but always you say, 'I want to make a movie because it's magic'. When I star in TV I feel it is my first thing. The more difficult thing is the first opportunity, after that everything is easy."

In her native Spain, she won a Goya - Spain's equivalent of the Oscar - for Sex And Lucia in the same year as being nominated for her portrayal of a battered wife in Mine Alone. That was the first film in Spain to deal with domestic violence. She lived with women in a refuge to prepare for the role, saying, "It was a horrible experience, but at the same time great because I became close to those women".

If she wants, there's little doubt that she could have a big career in Hollywood after Spanglish. She could, some will undoubtedly say, be the next Penelope Cruz. Vega is already mistaken for the Spanish actress who flirted with Hollywood in films like Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Vanilla Sky. "It happens a lot, here in England and Australia. I enter a shop and the salesgirl goes, 'you are Penelope Cruz'. It's a good comparison."

* Spanglish opens in North-East cinemas on February 25.

Published: 17/02/2005