Eva Mendes Celebrates Her Mom’s Birthday with Sweet Photos: ‘Mami Lioness and Her Cub’

Eva Mendes is celebrating a very special birthday for her “lioness” mom.

“Mom is 82 years old!” wrote the actress in the description of an Instagram dedication to her mother, Eva Pere Suarez, on Monday.

Three photos posted by the actress (49) show her and Suarez posing for the cameras. The Snatch star, in a simple black T-shirt, has a cat’s nose and whiskers drawn on his face. Suarez can be seen in a striped blazer, chic necklaces — and, in one shot, elegant shades.

“Mama Lioness and her cub,” Mendes added in her caption. She added her love for her mother, calling Suarez her queen: “Te amo Mami. You are my Reina.”

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Eva Pere Suarez and Eva Mendes on Instagram.

Eva Mendes/Instagram

Born in Miami, Florida and raised in Los Angeles, Mendes has daughters Esmeralda Amada, 9, and Amada Lee, 7, with Ryan Gosling, 42. Training day the actress has made a habit of publicly celebrating her mom.

In August, she posted another sweet selfie with her mother in the background, adding another throwback photo of Suarez. “Mami and me,” Mendes wrote. “Slide to see where my Cuban roads came from. That’s Mami 50 years ago.”

In a July Instagram post under the same throwback shot, the actress wrote that “it’s beautiful to look back and see her like this.” She added: “One day my children will understand that I wasn’t always a mom.” We must continue to tell our stories. There is so much to tell in all of us women.”

For Mother’s Day 2020, Mendes said Access Hollywood Live the holiday would be a family gathering centered not on her, but on Suarez. “We’re all going to go to her house and bombard her with love,” she said at the time.

Two years later in the Mother’s Day episode Today with Hoda and Jenna, Mendes tearfully revealed that her mom is “not doing very well right now.” She thanked host Hoda Kotb for her well wishes and said, “She’s a survivor in every way.”

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On her own identity as a mother, Mendes said she had no plans to have children until she met Gosling. The two met while working on the 2013 film A place behind the pinesand Mendes has since mentioned La la country star as her husband.

“I never wanted kids before until I fell in love with Ryan,” she said during a 2020 interview. Fitzy & Wippa Nova 96.9. “It somehow worked until I was 40 years old and gave birth to my first child. I think I was 42 for the second one, so it worked out that I had a career and then I focused on my family.”

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Eva Mendes and Ryan Gosling in 2013.

Dave Allocca/Starpix/Shutterstock

That shift in focus resulted in a multi-year hiatus from acting for Mendes, who — in addition to voicing a yoga instructor in a children’s series Bluey 2021 — last appeared in Gosling’s 2014 fantasy thriller The Lost River.

In July after the release of Gosling’s hit film Barbie, Mendes took their family “glamping” at a resort in the El Capitan Canyon wilderness north of Santa Barbara. A source told PEOPLE that they “went to the beach with the kids and also walked a mile up the road to play with goats and alpacas.”

Another source said Mendes and the “I’m Just Ken” singer are “really enjoying family time” with their daughters. “When they’re not working, they’re all about their girls.”

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Source: HIS Education