It's not easy playing a serial killer. It takes a lot out of you, psychically speaking. And in Salma Hayek's case, to play the serial killer you have to fly to Florida and live out of a hotel and run from location to location and never really feel like you've landed. You start to imagine you're on the lam, and that's how Salma's feeling on a Tuesday morning in Jacksonville as the elevator opens and she looks left and then right, peering from behind the Prada shades that don't stop anyone from recognizing her as Salma Hayek; on an imaginary WANTED list, hers would be the best-looking mug shot. She's dressed casual but, of course, effortlessly sophisticated in jeans and a green-and-white sweater by Juicy Couture and white Chanel heels, shoes that would not befit an escapee: Salma Hayek can't really run, and she sure can't hide. This is the first week of five in the northern tip of Florida, filming Lonely Hearts, a 1940s-noirish cop flick, costarring James Gandolfini and John Travolta as the detectives who are looking for her and her murderous partner, played by Jared Leto.

She's a little tired, a little ragged, missing her dogs—"Oh, my dogs!" she says—and in semi-desperate need of just a little time off. She worked late the night before. She spent hours and hours in wardrobe—trying to dress like a homicidal maniac. "I'm dressing her really proper and elegant—always with something a little off, something that's not perfect," Salma says. "But actually I think that this is the period that suits me the best. I was trying on clothes for five hours yesterday, and they were all real clothes from the forties, and everything fit. And it's the pointy bras with the girdles and the stockings—we're always wearing period undergarments."

On this particular morning, looking for psychic relief, looking for relief in general, Salma Hayek gets into her car, a rented Jaguar, parked out on the downtown Jacksonville curb. Ignition. Shift to drive. "So, what do you want to do?" she says.

And then in a few minutes you and Salma Hayek, on this sunny, clear-skied Florida day, are on the road north, headed for the coast, looking for a place to eat, looking for a little escape. First, a literal getaway: "Maybe we'll get a boat," she says. Then she starts talking about a more personal break. "You have to know how to really get away from your stress, from your situation," she says as the car searches beneath the downtown Jacksonville freeway for a way out of town. "You have to learn how to escape yourself. Otherwise, you get to another place and you are still stressed. You are still what you were. You are the same, with different architecture." She's on the highway now; the window is rolled down, and her hair is enjoying the breeze. "But right now, let's just relax," she says.

When a star achieves critical mass, it is ordinarily through the gaseous powers of a film, a big movie, a multiplex blockbuster. But 38-year-old Salma Hayek needs no such celestial event; she is today like a star ascending on its own, in a separate solar system, a star who's been with us for a while and has steadily upgraded her power. Right now, as summer begins, Salma Hayek's not just in Florida; she appears to be everywhere. Was it that dress? The dark-blue Prada she wore to the Oscars, with the plunging neck, the antique jais-beaded embroidery? Salma came off as the star of the ceremony, even though she had no nomination. One Hollywood afternoon she shows up in her hybrid car in a Prada gown, and the next day her glamorousness lands her on the front page of a million newspapers, even though Salma is not by nature a fashion slave. "Can we talk about escaping fashion?" she jokes as she picks up speed on the interstate.

"She doesn't spend a lot of time on her clothes; she just knows how to find the right thing to make her look great," says Penélope Cruz, her partner in all other crimes except shopping. Take the Oscar dress. A lot of planning? Not really. Salma just happened to have been over at Ashley Judd's place. Ashley happened to be getting fitted with Prada. The Prada people happened to ask Salma if she'd like to wear Prada. Next day Prada sent over some sketches. "I picked the ones I liked," she says. The rest is best-dressed Hollywood history.

"She looked so great, but then she always looks good because it's her spirit," continues Cruz, who is about to costar with Hayek in the female buddy film Bandidas, due out this winter. Penélope has known Salma since the day, seven years ago, when Penélope called Salma to thank her for some kind remarks Salma had made about Penélope on a Spanish television show. "On the phone she said, 'Call me when you get to L.A.,'" Penélope says, "and I always remember that day when she picked me up at the airport, when I didn't know anyone and she took me out to dinner instead of dropping me off at the hotel."

Bandidas is a western and a comedy and their version of a cowboy movie, as well as their way of getting away together. "We share everything but boyfriends," Cruz once remarked. (Hayek, who has been seen off-screen with Josh Lucas and Edward Norton, is currently said to be single.) They presented the idea to Luc Besson to produce; Sam Shepard and Dwight Yoakam signed on. The film features a scene in which Salma's more experienced character teaches the less experienced character played by Penélope precisely how to kiss, using Steve Zahn as a model. "We just use Steve's face to train," says Penélope.

"And the clothes"—designed by Olivier Bériot, a French designer— "are the most beautiful I have ever worn in a film. Oh, my God," says Salma. Her car cuts toward the shore, traveling alongside the Saint John River, and she describes another upcoming project, Ask the Dust, the filmic rendition of the novel by John Fante, adapted and written by Robert Towne, scriptwriter of Chinatown.

"It's a love story, and it's amazing," says Salma. "Robert wrote the screenplay, and for 30 years he never had the cast right. He'd have the woman but not the man, the man but not the woman. At one time, Al Pacino was talking about doing it, and now it's Colin Farrell and me."

Towne holds Salma in the highest regard. "She has a wonderful comic timing," he says, "and she instinctively understands how to use everything about her." Then he makes a remark that you hear a lot when you talk to people about Salma Hayek. "She's a wise person," he says, "a very old soul. I always say she's like this very erotic grandmother, though certainly not physically, of course. She's wonderful on camera. You know, there are a world of actresses who look beautiful. But as the camera works on them day after day, either they get better-looking or you start to see things. You start taking apart beauty, and the camera seems to only find Salma more and more beautiful."

"The movie's about an Italian-American," explains Salma. "He comes to Los Angeles, and all he wanted to do was to be a writer. She is a waitress from Mexico, and all she wanted to do was to be American. They fall in love: She has fallen in love with the one man who cannot ever give her the opportunity to have children with an American last name so that they will not have to suffer what she has suffered. And he has fallen in love with the one woman who cannot read, and they hate each other for it. They don't want to be in love," she says as she pulls up to the Sandollar, a way-out-of-the-way fish place at a marina that is the picture of the north Florida coast—a scene out of either an Elmore Leonard novel or a Jimmy Buffett song. It's on piers with a deck and round cement tables, and looks out on moored boats and mud flats. A flock of seagulls laughs overhead. The waitress sneaks an autograph request for the boss.

"How is the gumbo?" Salma asks.

"Oh, it's delicious," says the waitress.

"I'll have the gumbo," she says, and she sits back and smiles and she's starting to escape the movie business.

She points to the boats, to one of the big boats. She makes a call. "Do you think we could get one of these?"

Salma Hayek grew up near boats, in Coatzacoalcos, in the Mexican state of Veracruz, along the sea. She escaped often, on trips to the lakes, to the mountains, to the United States. "The first time I saw snow, I think it was in Vail," she says. "And you know we come from a town where at Christmas we had quite a few Santa Clauses fainting from the heat. So for us to see snow was a big deal." Her father, of Lebanese descent, was a sports nut, so there were trips for World Cups, Super Bowls, Wimbledon matches. Salma teamed up with her mother, of Spanish descent, who was, like Salma at the time, a shopping nut. Her brother was a water-skier, a national champion in Mexico. "My brother was one of those guys that was a straight-A student, and everything he did he did well. "Not me," she says.

She was precocious, talking at six months, walking at nine, and, as a two-year-old, taking a trip to Europe, where she remembers, thanks to some old Super 8, the little black-and-white leather jacket that so charmed the Europeans. "It had fringe, and it was made by the Indians of the north of Mexico, from Tamaulipas."

The gumbo arrives, and on the deck of the Sandollar, a cell-phone call comes through. It's about the boat. There are no boats in the area. The boats are south. It's a drive. "That's fine," says Salma. She's got the whole day. She relaxes in the waterside breeze. She leaves, thanking the waitresses, who are tickled pink. Salma is small—five feet two inches—but leaves gaping jaws, a big wake of happiness.

Back in the car, she remembers when she was nine and all she wanted to be was a gymnast—training, practicing, doing nothing else, not even playing with her friends, and then being drafted by the Mexican gymnastic team, an offer her father turned down. "He said, 'I'm not going to take away the opportunity of my daughter to have a childhood.' And I resented him, and then I wanted to escape from that town that prevented me from doing that, and that's how I got out of there and went to school in Louisiana at the age of twelve. I always have wished that I'd gone," she says. She adds, "But hey, I adore my father. We get along fine."

At boarding school, she was a practical joker of sorts, a trickster, which is to say she was not asked to come back when the nuns discovered she'd hired a maid for her room. She's still sheepish about that. "I am a Virgo, and Virgos are supposed to be organized, but I am not an organized Virgo," she laments. When she was fourteen, her parents sent her to Paris for private French classes, but, proving herself to be a great actress, she somehow convinced her parents that her teacher had died of a heart attack. She was moved to another school, a little more lax ("If you didn't go, you didn't go") and a little more convenient to the coast of the south of France ("We were on the beach all the time"). Before starting classes she hitchhiked from Greece to France, solo, something she mentioned to her parents only recently. "I thought to myself, Look, as long as I don't get into trouble. As long as I don't get drunk, and I come back a virgin, and I come back alive." She seems sheepish again. "It was very dangerous. I was insane to do that, but I wouldn't trade it for the world. It was a good experience," she says. What was also insane was the amount of clothes she bought for her trip: she backpacked with suitcases.

When she got home and finished school, she went into acting and eventually landed the role of Teresa in the hit Mexican series of the same name. Teresa was a social climber. Thus, Salma became famous for wearing clothes from the eighties—shoulder pads, neon colors, black, stuff Salma winces when recalling. The role taught her the limits of fame, even in the soaps. "I said, 'I'm gonna take a vacation,' and I went to Puerto Vallarta, and surprise, surprise, there was no escape for me anymore. I was completely mobbed. I ended up staying in the hotel room the entire time. Couldn't go to the beach. Couldn't go to the restaurants. Couldn't go downstairs. That was a failed escape."

Salma's car races through the sun-drenched swamps, the serpentine river runs. Flocks of white-winged birds veer left and right through hedges of scrub oaks and palmettos, a coastal jungle dotted with houses that, come to think of it, look good to her as long as she's going to be living here for a few weeks. "Could I rent a place like that, I wonder?" she says. She's good at fresh starts. Look at her career: After reaching the height of fame in Mexico, on TV, she traded it all in and moved to L.A., where she started out as an unemployed actress. She sees the move, in retrospect, as a kind of creative flight. "When I came here, I escaped my own invention of myself at the time," she says. "I escaped fame. I escaped everything that I was. Or everything that I was not but had become. And in a way I escaped a form of mediocrity, because sometimes success is a form of mediocrity."

Her first role in America was in a forgotten series called Street Justice. "I played the bride of a gang member, a world I knew nothing about," she says. "That was typecasting. I had never even seen a gang member. We don't have them in Mexico, not in my neighborhood." She was first noticed in Desperado, after which came From Dusk till Dawn and Fools Rush In, and a long list of films including Dogma, in which she played an angel of God. And then Frida. Frida was more than just a movie for her, of course. As a project, it was the fulfillment of a dream; it was her take on a personal icon, a Mexican national hero, an artist for all time. Frida Kahlo's story of persistence and fortitude inspired Salma Hayek in the obstacle-ridden, eight-year-long path to the creation of the film. And in the end, in addition to an Academy Award nomination, Salma won a lasting and fruitful understanding of Kahlo's artistry and genius.

"What was inspiring about Frida, what is a reality check for me, was her courage to be unique," says Salma. "It was the nineteen-twenties, and she was gay, and that was unaccepted, but she never apologized for who she was. She was always in search of who she was. And she always had the courage to be exactly that. It didn't make her popular. It didn't make her paintings sell. It got her into a lot of trouble. I think in modern society, that's heroic."

For her part, she faces up to pressures in part with action. "I like to break things completely apart," she says. Witness her involvement in the environmental-action group Green Power. As she drives toward a possible boat in Florida, she is calculating her trip the following week to the Arctic for a press conference—a trip to the Nunavut province, at the edge of the Arctic Circle, where global warming is melting away a community, its food supply, its life. In the Arctic, among indigenous people, global warming is not a hypothesis. "The place itself, it literally illustrates what's going on," she says. She's excited to go but also a little nervous, not least because she grew up in a warm climate. "What am I going to wear to the Arctic?" she asks, only half joking.

Witness as well her work with domestic violence—visiting shelters and publicizing their cause, ever since she discovered that a close friend was being beaten by her partner. (Just recently, as an Avon spokeswoman, she helped steer $25,000 from Avon to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, so that bilingual staff people could take calls from Spanish-speaking women.) For Lonely Hearts, she has coincidentally spent hours interviewing female inmates charged with murder, in preparation for her role. She is quick to note that many of the women she interviewed were accused of killing their male partners, and that many of the women had suffered abuse. "Of course, a lot of these women were in domestic-violence situations," Salma says.

At the dock in Saint Augustine, America's oldest European-established city, Salma is looking for the captain of the boat, a 33-foot fishing vessel christened The Knot Tied Down, and trying to get up the gangplank in her heels. Finding the boat. Meeting the captain and then shoving off. "This is going to be good, huh?" she says.

In a flash, the heels are off. There are a couple of beers onboard, Coronas. "I drink Pacifico, but you're not gonna find that here," she says. Captain Jim is up on the deck, steering out through the channel past the old Spanish Fort, out into the inlet, where the river meets the Atlantic Ocean.

Salma is talking, reminiscing about everything, about politics, about the time she worked with mother Teresa, about quantum physics—in particular, the Heisenberg principle, the theory that says, in part, that observation skews what is observed. "Yes, by looking at something you change it," she says. "Incredible!"

The captain cruises. "Can you take us out into the ocean?" asks Salma, who sits back and takes in the breeze and the perfect Florida afternoon. Then she sees it. A dolphin. Then another. Salma's eyes are wide. She's excited. She's pointing, shouting. Another dolphin, a little closer, its gray back breaking the surface with a small, sleek arc. In a minute, she is surrounded by dolphins. "Kill it," she shouts to Captain Jim, who looks perplexed. "The engine, I mean!" she says. "Stop the engine!"

Dolphins encircle her now. And Salma is pleased, relaxed maybe. So much so that a couple of days later, she heads down to the Keys to go scuba diving—she's a big diver—and stumbles onto a grassroots group helping rehabilitate dolphins that were beached in March in Florida—the Marine Mammal Conservancy, a non-profit organization, based in Key Largo, that works to return dolphins to the wild. "They were just volunteers, and they needed more volunteers, and I was there, and it was very cool," she says afterward. "I needed something. This character was making me crazy." Dolphin rehabilitation turns out to be a balm for the stress of playing a murderer. ("I've met a lot of movie stars, and she is just an angel," said one of the volunteers on the scene when she arrived, "and she was ready to do anything. I mean, holding the animals—she was shoving pills down the dolphin's throat!")

But for now, on this lazy Tuesday in Jacksonville, the boat lingers for a few more hours.

"Jim, would you take dogs on your boat?" Salma asks the captain idly.

"How many?"

"Five."

"Maybe," the captain says.

Around six, the boat heads in and docks, and then she drives back into Jacksonville, the sky fading in deeper, darker colors, a crash of burning orange draping the city in the day's last seconds. Salma retires, ready for more rehearsals as a serial killer—a thoughtful, bighearted killer, who would save a dolphin in a heartbeat.