If you guessed Salma Hayek, you got it. The woman behind that clue painted her way to an Oscar nomination as Frida Kahlo in Frida in 2002, becoming the first Mexican actress ever nominated for Best Actress. Six years earlier she had stopped every heart in the Titty Twister as Santanico Pandemonium, the vampire queen of From Dusk Till Dawn, dancing barefoot in a bikini with a python around her shoulders. “Quentin told me, ‘Oh, by the way, you’re dancing with a snake,'” she later told E! News. “I said, ‘I can’t do that, I can’t do that. It’s my greatest fear.'”
She did it anyway, and she told Yahoo she “had to go on trance to do the dance.” The baby girl she had at 41 has grown up into a young woman who looks so much like her mother that their side-by-side photos are hard to tell apart. Salma Hayek turned 60 on September 2, and her daughter, Valentina Paloma Pinault, is 19 now and living a life her mother never did at that age.
How Did Frida’s Star Become A Mom At 41?
By 2006, Salma had already lived several careers. She had been a soap star in Mexico with Teresa before moving to Los Angeles barely speaking English. Her breakthrough came opposite Antonio Banderas in Desperado in 1995, and then she spent years fighting to get Frida made as its producer and star. That was the year she met French businessman François-Henri Pinault, whose family’s luxury group owns Gucci, and in March 2007 she confirmed both their engagement and her pregnancy.
Valentina was born on September 21, 2007, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to Wikipedia’s account and her mother’s own birthday posts, which have marked the date every year since. “I became a mother very late,” Salma told Vogue Mexico in 2022, adding that she wanted a child so badly nothing else mattered. The couple married on Valentine’s Day 2009 in Paris, a fitting date for the parents of a girl named Valentina, and renewed their vows that April in Venice.
The little girl grew up between Paris, London and Los Angeles, mostly out of the spotlight. Her mother kept her off magazine covers for years and shared her mainly in birthday posts, which is why so many fans first saw her as a teenager and did a double take. But Valentina did not grow up an only child in the house, because her father already had three children of his own.
Who Else Sits At The Pinault Family Table?
Salma married into a big family, and she has called her husband’s children her own for well over a decade. François-Henri has a son, François, and a daughter, Mathilde, from his first marriage to Dorothée Lepère, which ended in 2004. Mathilde is Valentina’s big sister and the two are close, and Hola has reported that Mathilde rides horses competitively. The sisters were photographed together with their parents this year at a dinner during the Venice Biennale, as Hello! reported.
Then there is Augustin, whom the family calls Augie. He is François-Henri’s son with supermodel Linda Evangelista, and he was born on October 11, 2006, which makes him 20. For years the tabloids treated that arrangement as awkward, but the two mothers proved them wrong in June 2025 when Salma and Linda sat side by side to cheer Augie at his high school graduation, as TODAY and Hola both reported. Salma has posted birthday tributes to him for years, and Linda has posted sweet ones of her own.
The family grew again this year. According to Hello!, Salma’s stepson François and his wife, Countess Lara Cosima Henckel von Donnersmarck, welcomed their first child, a boy also named François. That made the star of Frida a grandmother, and she told People at the Women in Film Honors on November 5 that she plans to call the baby “Panchito,” the Mexican nickname for François.
With an Oscar-nominated mother and a father in the fashion business, it would have been easy to guess where Valentina was headed next. She surprised everyone.
Did Valentina Follow Her Mom Into Movies?
For a while, it looked like she might. Valentina posed with her mother on the cover of Vogue Mexico in 2022, and the next year she walked the red carpet beside her at the 2023 Academy Awards, twenty years after Salma’s own nomination. Salma clearly loved having her there, though she joked to Vogue Mexico that her daughter had a habit of borrowing her Yves Saint Laurent purse. “I can see in that purse everything I can’t find in my drawers,” she said.
In October 2024, Salma told TODAY that her daughter was “going her own way” and dreamed of directing rather than acting. “I love it,” she said. Then came Valentina’s 18th birthday in September 2025, which Salma celebrated with rare family photos from a weekend party at Chilham Castle in Kent, England. “My beautiful dancing queen. Today you turned 18!!!!!” her mother wrote on Instagram. “So many things have changed in your life, but you are always soooo you.”
That party in England was a hint. Valentina had already chosen London over Hollywood, and in June the two of them made a rare appearance together at London’s Serpentine Summer Party, which Salma helped host. What she has been doing there since is the part her mother is proudest of.
What Is Valentina Doing At 19?
Valentina is in her second year at King’s College London, studying digital media and culture, according to Hello! and Latination. Hello! reported that she picked London over several American universities. She says the city won her over completely. “I love pub culture. I love British humour,” she told Tatler, and Quién reported that she called London’s culture her favorite thing in the world.
In October, the girl who used to hide behind her mother’s birthday posts landed her first magazine cover. Tatler put Valentina on its December issue in a shimmering gold Gucci dress, alongside English rugby player Henry Pollock, 21, and named the two joint number one on its Little Black Book list of Britain’s most eligible young people. She was honest about how strange the spotlight still feels, telling the magazine that big events can be “kind of daunting” and that she prefers going with family. She also said, according to Quién, that growing up with famous parents showed her what she does not want from life.
Her mother was not shy about her reaction. “The baby that came out of my womb!” Salma wrote on Instagram, as Hello! reported, calling her “kind, thoughtful, caring, hilarious.” A few weeks later, the woman who once danced with a python she was terrified of stood at the Women in Film Honors and told People that turning 60 did not scare her at all. “I’m still doing what I love, and I’m blessed to have family, friends, health, energy and dreams,” she said. “Let’s go.”
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