• Faith: Christian - Catholic
• Career: Actress
• Birthday:  March 05, 1974

Eva Mendes is an actress whose career started in the late 1990s with roles in movies like "Urban Legends: Final Cut" and "Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror." Her role in 2001's "Training Day" made a turning point in her career, leading to parts in commercially successful movies like "Hitch" and "2 Fast 2 Furious." She's also starred in "Ghost Rider" and "The Spirit," both film adaptations of comics and ventured into more dramatic territory with roles in "We Own the Night,” "Last Night," and "The Women."

Mendes' other films also include "Out of Time,” "The Other Guys," and "Girl in Progress." She's also appeared in several music videos for artists like Will Smith and has been an ambassador for brands like Cartier, Calvin Klein, Reebok, and Pantene shampoo. She's designed for New York & Company and is the creative director of CIRCA Beauty, a makeup line sold at Walgreens. She's been in a relationship with Ryan Gosling since 2011, and the couple share two daughters.

Mendes was born in 1974 in Miami, Florida. Her mother in Los Angeles raised her after her parents' divorce. She had one older brother, Juan Carlos, who died from throat cancer in 2016. She also has an older sister, Janet, and a younger half-brother, Carlos. She attended Hoover High School in Glendale and later studied marketing at California State University, Northridge, but left college to study acting under Ivana Chubbuck.

Her acting career started after a talent manager saw her picture in a friend's portfolio. Her first movie role was in a group of young people who became lost in middle America in the direct-to-video horror movie "Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror." Mendes wasn't happy with her performance and soon hired an acting coach. Afterward, she took the roles in "A Night at the Roxbury" and "My Brother the Pig."

What religion is Eva Mendes?

Mendes was raised as a Roman Catholic. One of her first ambitions was to be a nun. In an interview with the Daily Mail, Mendes said, "My first ambition was to be a nun. But my sister informed me that nuns didn't get paid, so I soon went off that idea. Then, I wanted to be an opera singer and an astronaut. Acting is just something I drifted into." Mendes has also expressed interest in meditation, saying, "I'm actually big into meditation, transcendental meditation, and that really helps create not only a sense of balance, but all the other stuff this is going to sound cliché, serenity and kind of a calm state of mind. And not that I'm like that all the time, but it helps me deal with life's ups and downs, coming from more of a centered place.”