In the biopic El Cantante, Jennifer Lopez steps away from her usual comedic roles to portray Puchi Lavoe, the crass, grasping wife of late salsa king Hector Lavoe, played in the film by Lopez's real-life husband Marc Anthony.

Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony are married in real life and married in El Cantante, a new biopic of salsa legend Hector Lavoe. The film, which opens in theatres Friday, was shown here last fall during the Toronto International Film Festival and both Lopez and Anthony were in town to promote it.

In portraying Puchi, the crass, grasping wife of Lavoe, Lopez takes on a role that the film's director, Leon Ichaso, says, "Will turn things around for her. She's known for kind of lighter, more comedic roles, and this one is close to her heart."

El Cantante is close to the heart of everyone involved. Lavoe, who died in 1993, was the king of salsa music and revered in the Puerto Rican community. This is the movie Lopez, who is of Puerto Rican descent, chose to be the first from her company, Nuyorican Productions. And she was determined to have Anthony play Lavoe long before they were partners in real life.

El Cantante has opened in the U.S. to mixed reviews, but Lopez seems to have anticipated not being able to please everyone.

"One of the most interesting things about learning about Hector was that so many people had a different story about who he was," she says. "For events of the exact same day, one person would say this happened, and you'd talk to somebody else and they'd say no, this is what happened."

The character of Puchi, says the actress, makes it clear just who is telling the story.

"She establishes that the ride is going to be bumpy and that it's her side of the story. 'You know, if you wanted somebody else's story, you should have asked somebody else,' that kind of thing," she says, indicating Puchi's belligerence.

In milder, Lopez style, she adds, "There was a lot of mystery surrounding him. We just got the person who was closest to him for 20 years and tried to extract as much of the truth as we could. We wanted to make these people human. There's not going to be every single answer ... we try to give you what happened, what his relationships were like and the kind of world he lived in."

The kind of world Lavoe lived in appears to have been a world of great artistic achievement and even greater heartbreak. Lavoe experienced such a mind-boggling series of tragedies -- the deaths of his mother, brother and teenage son, drug addiction, a house fire, a robbery, a nervous breakdown, a suicide attempt -- that some of the details were left out of the movie, "because nobody would believe it," says Ichaso.

Lopez says she thinks most artists experience the world a little differently. "I always feel like I feel things a little more deeply," she says, "and I think Hector was even more like that than others. For me, I had a good beginning, a great upbringing, a great mom and dad who live together. I have my sisters, I had this kind of great, boring, stable upbringing with lots of love in my life."

But not so Lavoe, says Lopez.Pretending to shoulder a heavy weight, she describes how Lavoe was "burdened with the huge boulders" life had given him in the way of personal loss.

"And then there's the fame! So now he had this whole other crazy thing happening," she adds.

"How do you not look for an escape?" she says, speaking of his addictions. "If you don't have love, you don't have family or comfort, where are you going to escape to?"

Anthony seems born to play salsa legend

At Hector Lavoe's funeral 14 years ago, thousands of people cheered the sight of singer/songwriter Marc Anthony, who had come to pay his respects.

"It was one of those milestone moments in my life," says Anthony, "and it opened a possibility that I didn't know if I wanted. I'm walking out. There are tens of thousands of people," he says, imitating the roar of the crowd. "They're like, 'You're the next Hector!' I'd just seen him, so in a way I was thinking, I hope not. I thought, 'I don't want this -- I want to be young. I don't want to live fast, die young and leave a pretty corpse. I want to see my kids get married and be a grandfather."

Anthony's father worked as an orderly at New York's Cardinal Cook Hospital, and wound up taking care of Lavoe for the last two years of Lavoe's life. Of course, Anthony's father's real job was music.

"My dad was a troubadour, a singer. He incorporated me into his show when I was three. I was a baby. I started singing professionally at 12. It was never a choice for me. Never a choice. To this day, I've never decided to be in the music business. It's what I was born to do. I guess that's why I feel like there's nothing I can't accomplish -- because I haven't chosen my career yet." He laughs. "Maybe I want to be an actor. I don't know yet."

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