It's not surprising that Jennifer Lopez doesn't like the press. When writing about her, journalists always focus on one of three points. First, her price-tag: the recent US TV movie, Selena, made her the first Latin American actress to get $1 million for a picture. Second, the perfection of her posterior (big, but beautiful seems to be the idea; a Sunday newspaper featured it in its glossy magazine pages. And, third, the poison of her tongue: in an interview in Movieline earlier this year, she made some decidedly candid comments about other stars.
Gwyneth Paltrow? "Some people get hot by association." Cameron Diaz? "A lucky model who was given a lot of opportunities." Lopez has apologised to her fellow actors. But the harm is done.
Of course there's nothing we love better than a feud, but until now, that's virtually all we've heard of her. Selena, the biopic of a Latin American music star gunned down four years ago by the president of her own fan club, was hardly seen in Europe. Here, it's Lopez's part in Steven Soderbergh's Out Of Sight that has "breakthrough role" written all over it.
An Elmore Leonard crime caper widely hailed in the US as last summer's hippest movie, it gains from Lopez's chemistry with co-star George Clooney. In return, it gives her a much more pro-active role than female sidekicks usually get in an action story. Plus $2 million, reputedly.
Lopez is sprawled over a hotel sofa in classic bad-girl pose, chewing gum, with one fist clenched. She doesn't look like anyone's arm candy. "I don't think of them as strong women," she says of the roles she tends to play. "I like characters that are really part of the story as opposed to window dressing - but I think the interesting thing is that they are real people. Nobody walks around being strong all the time." Well, maybe she does. Her success story, she says, could be defined as much in terms of Rocky as Cinderella. Screw the glass slipper, this woman's a worker ("I don't sleep") and a fighter ("You have to get up there and say, `You like me?' And if they say, `No,' it's like, `OK. Screw you! Next?' ").
But you can see why men drool. Lopez has four-inch silver heels and a red dress that clings without visible means of support to a lot of luminous gold skin, a long bell of hair the colour of marrons glace. As she puts it: "If they say hot and steamy, I can't hate them for that, can I?" In Out Of Sight, she plays a federal marshal ("I got really good at the guns"), reluctantly in love with Clooney's escaped convict and standing up to the moral dilemma spunkily. A career girl's gotta do what a career girl's gotta do.
Roger Ebert was only one American critic who likened the partnership of Clooney and Lopez to Bogart and Bacall - the couple start out with an inadvertent clinch that turns a car boot into a romantic location. "An actress who can be convincingly tough and devastatingly erotic," Kenneth Turan wrote of her in the Los Angeles Times.
When asked why she wanted to get into movies, Lopez talks about watching Terminator 2 as a teenager. But she also cites Ava Gardner or fellow Latina Rita Hayworth, Monroe and Bette Midler. And, like Midler, she has one foot in the record business. Since the break-up of her yearlong marriage to a Cuban model-come-waiter she met in Miami, her name has been linked with Tommy Mottola - Mariah Carey's ex-husband and head of Sony Music and rapper Sean "Puff Daddy" Coombs.
She has her own album out next year, Gypsy, of which she says, "My music is kind of a hybrid - the music somebody like me would like, who grew up in the Bronx, of Latin (Puerto Rican) descent but a very American family. I have a lot of street smarts because of the neighbourhood I grew up in." As the daughter of a businessman and a teacher, her early life was comparatively sheltered. "It wasn't so much a bad neighbourhood as one where you had to be careful. And the sensibilities you grow up with in a city teach you to be more alert, aware, more careful." This may be why she plays tough so successfully, why she can cut such a swathe through the film industry.
Her films, if not her co-stars, have often been undistinguished. After a debut in Mi Familia, she was the undercover cop opposite Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson in Money Train, and Jack Nicholson's mistress in Blood And Wine. She was excellently reviewed in Oliver Stone's U- Turn, and one of the more acceptable faces of Coppola's frightful Jack, the voice of Azteca, the worker ant in Antz, and the snake-wrestling scientist in Anaconda. But her reception for Out Of Sight has been extraordinary.
Lopez reacts warily to questions that imply she's the spearhead for a wave of Latin actresses. On one hand, Hollywood has come a long way since Rita Hayworth and Raquel Welch had to change their names from Margarita Cansino and Raquel Tejada respectively. On the other, that should make race irrelevant. Lopez makes a grimace when asked about it: "People get hung up on that stuff, don't they? It's a thing Steven (Soderbergh) and I had talked about. He just saw me and he thought I was the best person for the role. I said I didn't think there should be any jokes about cheeky chica or anything referring to the fact that I'm Latin. That's not important for this movie. And he said, `I absolutely agree'.
"Hollywood is being more open-minded about casting. I'm perceived as an actress who is Latin - not a Latin actress as in one who just does Latin roles. I'm considered for roles that are not Latin, and that's been a big step in the right direction for me. It's something that I've always worked towards, and been conscious of from the beginning of my career. Faced with two or three projects, I'd often do something that wasn't so stereotypical." She says her million-dollar price tag is a good thing. "I don't think it's a bad thing. I want to make as much as, or more than, Demi Moore when it's my time.
"I don't think that's so much success. People make so much more money than that," she adds, at risk of sounding like Linda Evangelista saying she wouldn't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day.
"It was a big thing because Latin actresses until that point were not in any sort of seven-figure bracket. It was a big thing for our community because now it just kicks open the door for everybody else. In that realm, I'm really proud of it." And she should be.
Out of Sight opened yesterday on general release