Banderas: I'm No Latin Lover

Aug. 1 -- At the Academy Awards in 1989, Antonio Banderas was a wide-eyed young actor from Spain, nominated for a role in a small foreign film.

He wandered among the movie stars like a kid with a free pass to Paradise, and then he stopped short.

"I saw this beautiful woman with a cream dress, with pearls," Banderas remembers. He asked his companion, Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, who it was, and learned it was Melanie Griffith.

Six years later, Banderas and Griffith found themselves on the same movie set for Two Much, and it was love at first sight — sort of.

"It was very, very fast and very compulsive, but at the same time, we were tied at the time," Banderas told Primetime's Diane Sawyer. Banderas was married to actress Ana Leza, and Griffith was married to Don Johnson, though both say their marriages were already foundering.

"We tried as much as we could to be respectful," said Banderas. "We just thought this may be one of those, you know, infatuation moments that we have when we shoot movies because we got to play together a couple, so let's just go home."

But the pair found that the infatuation did not go away. After both of their marriages ended in divorce, they were married in 1996.

Center Stage

Today Banderas, 42, is no longer a spectator, but the center of attention. Luck seemed to smile on him over and over. He was born in Malaga, in southern Spain, the son of a policeman and an elementary school teacher. He became a classically trained theater actor, but he was discovered by Almodovar, one of Spain's most renowned directors, who put him in several of his movies.

Then he was discovered again by a powerful woman hungry for a new conquest: Madonna. In her 1991 documentary Truth or Dare, Madonna confessed she had a crush on the little-known European heartthrob. Madonna tracked him down and flirted with him, but Banderas didn't understand a word she was saying: he didn't speak English.

Banderas and Madonna co-starred in the 1996 movie version of the hit musical Evita. She played ambitious politican's wife Eva Peron, and he played the conscience she didn't have, a fictionalized version of the Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara.