LONDON — There ought to be a name for them, "Gael's Groupies" or "Bernal's Babes" — something like that. Pleasant, seemingly respectable women who turn into starry-eyed teeny-boppers in the presence of Gael Garcia Bernal.

Women like Win Beaumont and her daughter, Christine. "He's so young, and he's done so much," the elder Beaumont gushes about the man who, according to Google, is the most famous Mexican this side of Frida Kahlo or Pancho Villa. "If he can get me going — and I'm 80! And his acting can only improve as he gets older."

Christine, 57, nodding, scans the lobby of Britain's National Film Theatre. "Do you think there's a stage door?" she asks her mum hopefully.

It's a brisk fall night on the banks of the Thames, but the NFT crowd is acting all hot and bothered. The object of their anticipation, Garcia Bernal, has come to town to lend his celebrity aura to Mexican Cinema Now, a six-week tribute to the country's celluloid renaissance.

Specifically, Garcia Bernal is on hand for a screening of "Y Tu Mama Tambien" (2001), the steamy revisionist road movie that transformed him and his best-friend co-star, Diego Luna, into international leading men. When the actor mounts the stage for a question-and-answer session following the film, the crowd erupts as if at a Beatles concert in 1964.

Squeals! Cheers! Mad applause! "Viva Mexico!" someone shouts from a back row. "You look good as a girl!" blurts a young Brazilian woman, alluding to the actor's tarted-up turn as an homme fatal in Pedro Almodovar's "Bad Education" (2004). Bernal smiles.

Well, to be honest, he looks good as just about anything, doesn't he? A conscience-stricken priest in "The Crime of Padre Amaro." A street punk who lives off the earnings of his killer canine in "Amores Perros." A horny Chilango on the bumpy highway to self-awareness in "Y Tu Mama." Or the youthful Ernesto "Che" Guevara of "The Motorcycle Diaries," another Bildungsroman with a social conscience, in which Garcia Bernal's furrowed brow serves as a virtual map to the tortured South American soul.

Last year he was as visible as ever, appearing in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's much-feted "Babel" and taking the lead in Michel Gondry's post-Freudian romantic fable "The Science of Sleep." Garcia Bernal aficionados can look forward to more of the same in 2007 and beyond. He'll be starring in Hector Babenco's "El Pasado" (The Past), which chronicles a married couple's difficult breakup, and is set to reteam with Luna as a pair of pro soccer players in Carlos Cuaron's "Rudo y Cursi."

Oh, and he also directed his first feature film, "Deficit," which he describes as a "generational allegory" focusing on a group of young, upper-class Mexicans coping with the country's ongoing socioeconomic upheavals.

FILMS AS FINGERPRINTS

More than a mere heartthrob, Garcia Bernal, 28, is something of a throwback, or possibly an endangered species: a non-Hollywood global glamour boy with the talent to back up the pin-up persona. Half a century ago, it seemed, there were lots of these guys and their female equivalents on the art-house circuit: Marcello Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jeanne Moreau. Cosmopolitan actors with international appeal who managed to preserve a palpable connection to their own countries and cultures. But in the ensuing decades, as "foreign cinema" lost much of its old-school cachet, such performers have grown scarce. Garcia Bernal, the most recognizable Mexican actor since the Golden Age of Pedro Infante and Dolores Del Rio, possesses an allure that translates across many different subtitles, plus the big-screen charisma of a Hollywood star.

Yet the next day, as he slides into a restaurant near Spitalfields Market for a late lunch, he is the picture of casual anonymity. Wearing thick-frame glasses, a rumpled leather jacket and a faded David Bowie T-shirt, he could pass for a punk-rock drummer or a young acting student trying to find his way in the world, which is what he was not long ago.

At an age when many screen actors either are still struggling to find their identities, or already have been locked into type, Garcia Bernal has achieved an impressively promiscuous list of credits.

In the process, he has crafted a compelling passage from flaming youth to tangled manhood. "That's what's so extreme about filmmaking. It is the epidermis of yourself, you know?" Bernal says. "Films are a fingerprint of what you are at that moment."

Emotionally open and intensely thoughtful, Bernal seems very comfortable in his own epidermis. Although physically slight at 5 feet 7 inches, he possesses an outsize magnetism, with a face whose handsomeness is more than the sum of its parts: the alert eyes, the Mick Jagger lips, the artfully tousled hair.

KNIGHT-ERRANT PARTS

Even as Garcia Bernal's popularity has propelled him into acting jobs across the world, he holds fast to his Mexican identity. That sense of attachment to his native culture, he says, has had a liberating effect on his career.

Daniela Michel, director of the Morelia International Film Festival in the Mexican state of Michoacan, notes that Garcia Bernal has continued to be a staunch advocate for Mexican and Latin American film, using his star power to help other artists and draw attention to social causes he cares about.

"He puts his money where his mouth his," Michel says.

For Garcia Bernal, both in his craft and in his life, the journey appears to matter as much as the destination, and each picaresque ramble leads him into a deeper encounter with the world and himself. His latest films extend that spirit of productive wanderlust. In "Babel," he's a well-meaning but reckless man whose anger-management issues boil over disastrously at a border crossing. In "The King," he plays the vaguely creepy, long-lost son of a Texas minister (William Hurt) and a prostitute.

And in "The Science of Sleep," he's a Mexican misfit in Paris, afloat in a dreamscape of job frustration, erotic longing and unresolved family issues. Alfonso Cuaron, who directed Garcia Bernal in "Y Tu Mama" and is one of his closest friends, says the actor's selectiveness in roles comes from his desire to keep learning and challenging himself.

"He never fell into the easy seduction of trying to have a career, the easy thing of taking roles that will expose him to mainstream audiences," Cuaron says.

Garcia Bernal has gravitated toward roles that simultaneously enhance and slyly subvert his Lothario image. His knight-errant outings usually have a self-mocking twist. In the final frames of "The Science of Sleep," Garcia Bernal's character sweeps up his beloved not on a trusty white steed, but a giant stuffed toy pony. In "The Motorcycle Diaries," Garcia Bernal's dashing Guevara and his faithful Sancho Panza sidekick (Rodrigo de la Serna) trek across South America on a Norton 500 motorbike.

The character Garcia Bernal says he most identifies with is Julio Zapata in "Y Tu Mama," a spoiled hedonist who discovers life's tragic side on a trip to a mystical beach with his gleefully crude friend (Luna) and an alluring older Spanish woman (Maribel Verdu). "I grew up in a very similar situation as Julio," Garcia Bernal says.

Even when playing oversexed, self-centered boy-men, Garcia Bernal still comes off as "a good sport who couldn't be unappealing if he tried," as Anthony Lane of The New Yorker wrote in his review of "The Science of Sleep." Lane's assertion may be put to the test if Garcia Bernal gets cast as the villain opposite Matt Damon in Universal's upcoming third installment of the Bourne story, "The Bourne Ultimatum," as the Hollywood buzz machine has it.