"I started working when I was 14 years old, [acting] on the streets of villages," says Banderas, whose English has become almost entirely comprehensible, as long as his hands underline the meaning. "It was like that for five years." At 19, after a stint at the School of Dramatic Arts, Spain's national theater company, Banderas left his parents and younger brother in Malaga and went to Madrid. Before he got steady work on the stage (and, later, won a role in 1982's Labyrinth of Passion, the first of five movies he made for Almodovar), Banderas earned as little as $5 a day. "I remember I couldn't even [afford] to take a bus, so I had to walk six miles to get to an audition," he says without emotion. "I would look between the cars to see if there was money."
Banderas hasn't had to look past his own front door since his American film debut in 1992's The Mambo Kings, in which he pulled off playing an English-speaking Cuban musician by learning his lines phonetically. "His language abilities at the time were none. Zero," says his agent at CAA, Emanuel Nunez. "He did a deal saying he would go to Berlitz. I apologized to the producer for originally misleading him about Antonio's English, but I knew once he'd met him..."
Despite his now near-fluency and roles in films that don't hinge on his Hispanic roots, Banderas still has to struggle to be seen as something other than a smoldering Romeo. "I never felt like a Latin lover until I came to this country," says Banderas, whose roles for Almodovar tended more toward a neurotic Spanish Woody Allen sensibility. "I never felt like a star, or a hunk, or a har-throb--I don't even know how to pronounce it."
Plenty of people can enunciate the word for him. The public has seized on his relationship with Griffith, whom he met eight months ago while filming Two Much (a comedy in which he plays a man so desperate for the affections of Griffith and Daryl Hannah that he pretends to be twins). Two months after filming started, Banderas split from his wife of eight years, Spanish actress Ana Leza (she played Banderas' sister in Philadelphia), and went public with Griffith. "There is no connection between [separating from] my wife and Melanie," Banderas says forcefully. "It's not like I met this girl and poom. In terms of getting famous, I could have done that with Madonna."
But what are subtleties of timing compared with the endless photo ops the relationship has seemed to provide? Banderas and Griffith snuggle at premieres. They embrace at parties. They kiss in public. They are flashbulb-friendly. "We decided to go in front of the public eye at the Blockbuster Awards [on June 3]because if you don't, [the press] starts to have fantasies that are wilder," Banderas explains. "They were inventing things about Melanie and me, saying it was a publicity campaign for Two Much."
Even when the twosome hasn't posed, cameras are ready to document their every move: Hard Copy films them jogging together, gossips insist Griffith is pregnant (she's not), and People snaps pictures of them kissing, with the headline "Oh, Stop It Already!" When the couple vacationed in Banderas' Madrid home this summer, local journalists slept in his doorway.
