Talisa Soto Biography

In the late 1980s Brooklyn-born Talisa Soto was a groundbreaking Puerto Rican model for international fashion magazines. She turned that into a movie career, most notably as a “Bond girl” in 1989’s Licence to Ill (starring Timothy Dalton as James Bond) and as Princess Kitana in Mortal Kombat (1995) and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997, with Sandra Hess). Leggy angular and athletic, she’s often cast as an exotic beauty, as in Don Juan DeMarco (1995, opposite Johnny Depp), but she’s also taken on more demanding roles, including her part in Piñero, the 2001 drama that starred Benjamin Bratt. Her other screen work includes the David Lynch short The Cowboy and the Frenchman (1988), the short-lived TV series Harts of the West (1993-94) and the misfire Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002, starring Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu).