Nah.
I noticed the change to the way she was credited when writing up my review for Magic Mike's Last Dance, but I just blew it off.
No disrespect to the person who has now shifted the way she self-identifies to reflect the identity of a man she married 14 years ago. But I'm just not going to do it.
When you are credited the same way for 30 years, that is your brand -- no matter if you divorce the person who gave you that name, if you marry someone new with a different name, what have you.
I might have accepted the name change if she'd changed it professionally when she married Francois-Henri Pinault in 2009. At that point I would have only been aware of her "Salma Hayek" credit for 15 years, and it would have been more of a "Courteney Cox Arquette" or "Rebecca Romijn-Stamos" situation. (I believe the hyphen belongs in one but not the other, but I can't be bothered to look it up.)
But whatever you think of the wisdom of changing your identity to reflect your union with David Arquette or John Stamos, you could argue that each of those names gained something sonically from the addition. With Rebecca Romijn, the first syllable of "Stamos" has a rhyming vowel sound with the second syllable of "Romijn," which I think makes it catchy sounding to the ear. With Courteney Cox, I'll only say the "Arquette" flows well enough and doesn't ruin anything.
"Salma Hayek Pinault" just doesn't sound right to me. As I was listening to the Filmspotting hosts discuss the third Magic Mike movie, they referred to her alternately as Hayek and Hayek Pinault, and the latter just never sounded right. Plus I suppose you could drop the Hayek altogether and just refer to her as Pinault, which really doesn't sound right -- and doesn't give the casual listener, raised on another name, any idea who you're talking about.
Women who marry and take their husband's last name have dealt with this kind of identity crisis throughout history, and as a man, I once welcomed the prospect of giving my own name to another person. But my wife did not actually take my name, and I'm glad she didn't -- she has a cooler last night than mine (literally, for anyone who knows her) and it certainly sounds better with her first name than mine would. Her first name ends in an A sound and my last name begins with an A sound, so the two words have no defining break between them and get kind of slurred together if you were to say them quickly. It's much better that she stuck with her maiden name, which I suppose is not actually a maiden name if you never changed it -- it's just her name.
Maybe because I have it in my own family, I don't want or need Salma Hayek to take her husband's last name. But it's also been different for famous women, particularly famous women in the entertainment industry. You create a brand when you start out, and it sometimes isn't even your own name that you start out with anyway. It's common for people to take a stage name that at least changes their last name, but sometimes they change their first name as well.
Salma Hayek has a particularly good brand, sonically, because it does a similar thing to what's going on in "Romijn-Stamos," where the second syllable of "Salma" has a rhyming vowel sound with the first syllable of "Hayek." The four total syllables also make for probably an ideal name length, though I might be biased there because my own name has four total syllables.
The "Pinault" doesn't do anything sonically -- and in fact, I'd argue it doesn't do anything, for anybody, except possibly her husband's ego.
And for her daughter. When I googled it I found that back in 2010, when Hayek legally changed her name, she attributed the decision to her feisty three-year-old daughter, who asked why she had only one last name. (Which is particularly uncommon in Latin culture, where there can be all sorts of last names, many of which are dropped in casual reference to the person.)
But Hayek didn't change her credit until Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, if IMDB is to be believed. Again according to google, she had to finally overcome studios' objection to affixing the Pinault, which she has apparently been trying to do for years.
It's interesting because I probably have a professional obligation to refer to someone the way they are credited. And I noticed the change in time to use the correct credit in my Magic Mike's Last Dance review (which you can read here).
But I don't know ... I just couldn't do it. Salma Hayek has been Salma Hayek since I first noticed her in Desperado in 1995, even though that's not a great movie. She was too good at creating her brand and now I refuse to acknowledge a new one, like Dunkin' Donuts telling me to start referring to the company as Dunkin'. I just won't do it.
At least my stubbornness is on the side of a sort of feminism.
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