Eva Mendes has hinted at a return to acting.
Eva Mendes
The 46-year-old movie star - who has Esmeralda, six, and Amada, four, with Ryan Gosling - has stepped back from Hollywood in recent years to focus her attention on her family life, but she's now admitted that her "ambition is coming back".
She explained: "I feel like, as far as my ambition, it didn’t go away, it just shifted onto the children.
"I applaud and look up to those women who can do it all, but I’m not one of them – and, thankfully, I have a choice not to work and I realise how fortunate I am that it’s even a choice. I’ve been so happy to be able to incubate with my babies, but now they are four and six, I’m starting to feel like my ambition is coming back."
Eva was born in Miami, Florida, to Cuban parents and raised in Los Angeles by her mother.
The actress still has fond memories of her family life during her childhood, even though it seemed odd to her friends.
She said: "I was definitely the baby of the family, and there was Cuban food and music and loud singing and yelling around the house all the time growing up.
"One of my earliest memories, around age 11, was having a girlfriend call me. She could hear my family in the background and said, ‘Oh, I’ll call you back later, it sounds like you guys are fighting.’ I said, ‘No, we’re not fighting, we’re having dinner!'"
However, Eva can also recall being told she's "too ethnic" by one casting director.
Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, she shared: "There was a commercial casting director who’d let me audition for commercials and kept bringing me in for callback. One day, after a year of never booking a job, I said, ‘Okay, tell me what I need to change so I can get cast?’
"She said, ‘Honey, it’s just your look. You’re too ethnic, so you’re never going to be the face of any American product.'"
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