Starring Salma Hayek in an Academy Award–nominated portrayal as Kahlo and Alfred Molina as her husband, Diego Rivera, the film was adapted by Clancy Sigal, Diane Lake, Gregory Nava, Anna Thomas, Antonio Banderas and unofficially by Edward Norton from the 1983 book Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera.
Frida received generally positive reviews from critics, and won two Academy Awards for Best Makeup and Best Original Score among six nominations.
Once regaining the ability to walk with a cane, Frida visits muralist Diego Rivera, demanding an honest critique of her paintings.
They reunite during a Día de los Muertos celebration where he asks her to welcome and house Leon Trotsky, who has been granted political asylum in Mexico.
Other Kahlo paintings either shown directly or depicted in the film by the characters include Frieda and Diego Rivera (1931), What the Water Gave Me (1938), The Two Fridas (1939), The Broken Column (1944), and The Wounded Deer (1946).
The film's stop motion animation sequence (created by The Brothers Quay) depicting the initial stages of Kahlo's recovery at the hospital after the accident is inspired by the Mexican holiday Day of the Dead.
The gown Valeria Golino wears at Kahlo's 1953 Mexican solo art exhibition is a replica of the dress that her character, Lupe Marín, wore in Rivera's 1938 portrait of her.
The film version of Frida Kahlo's life was initially championed by Nancy Hardin, a former book editor and Hollywood-based literary agent, turned early "female studio executive", who, in the mid-1980s wished to "make the transition to independent producing.
"[4] Optioning the book in 1988, Hardin "tried to sell it as an epic love story in the tradition of Out of Africa, attracting tentative interest from actresses such as Meryl Streep and Jessica Lange, but receiving rejection from the film studios.
"[4] Madonna "announced her plans to star in a film based on Frida's life", and Robert De Niro's Tribeca Productions reportedly "envisioned a joint biography of Rivera and Kahlo.
"[4] In the spring of 1991, director Luis Valdez began production on a New Line feature about Frida Kahlo starring Laura San Giacomo in the lead.
San Giacomo's casting received objections due to her non-Hispanic ethnicity, and New Line complied with the protesters' demands, and left the then-titled Frida and Diego in August 1992 citing finances.
[4]Valdez was contacted early on by Salma Hayek, then unknown in the U.S., who sent "her [promo] reel to the director and phoned his office", but was ultimately told she was then too young for the role.
[5] Hayek personally secured access to Kahlo's paintings from her, and began to assemble a supporting cast, approaching Alfred Molina for the role of Rivera in 1998.
[19] Stella Papamichael from the BBC gave the film three out of five stars and stated "Julie Taymor's biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo connects the dots between art and anguish.
Although involving and sprightly, it offers the kind of guilty pleasure a Fine Arts student might derive from a glossy cartoon strip.
"[21] The New York Post's Jonathan Foreman praised the score and Taymor's direction, saying that she "captures both the glamorous, deeply cosmopolitan milieu Kahlo and Rivera inhabited, and the importance Mexico had in the '30s for the international left.
The film's unique visual language takes us into an artist's head and reminds us that art is best enjoyed when it moves, breathes and is painted on a giant canvas, as only the movies can provide.