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

On Instagram, the actress honored the 82-year-old Eva Pere Suarez, calling her “mi Reina”

Eva Mendes is celebrating the very special birthday of her “lioness” mom.

“Mami is 82!” the actress wrote in a caption for an Instagram tribute to her mother, Eva Pere Suarez, on Monday.

The three photos that the actress, 49, posted show her and Suarez posing for the camera. The Hitch star, in a simple black t-shirt, is sporting a cat nose and whiskers drawn on her face. Suarez can be seen in a striped blazer, chic necklaces — and, in one shot, stylish shades.

“Mami Lioness and her Cub,” added Mendes in her caption. She added love for her mother, calling Suarez her queen: “Te amo Mami. Eres mi Reina.”

Related: Eva Mendes Explains Why She and Ryan Gosling Don't Appear on Red Carpets Together

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

In August, she posted another sweet selfie with her mother in the background, adding a second throwback photo of Suarez. “Mami & Me,” Mendes wrote. “Slide to see where I get my Cubana ways from. That’s Mami 50 years ago.”

In a July Instagram post under the same throwback shot, the actress wrote that it was “beautiful to look back and see her this way.” She added, “One day my kids will also figure out I wasn’t always Mami. We gotta keep telling our stories. There’s so much to tell in all us women.”

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

Two years later on a Mother's Day episode of Today With Hoda & Jenna, Mendes tearfully revealed that her mom wasn’t “doing too well right now.” She thanked host Hoda Kotb for giving well wishes and said, “She's a survivor in every way.”

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Of her own identity as a mother, Mendes has said she hadn’t planned on having kids until she met Gosling. The two met while working on the 2013 film The Place Beyond the Pines, and Mendes has since referred to the La La Land star as her husband.

"I never wanted babies before until I fell in love with Ryan,” she said during a 2020 interview with Nova 96.9's Fitzy & Wippa. “It kind of worked out to where I was 40 and having my first baby. I think I was 42 for the second one, so it worked out in that way that I had a career and then I changed my focus to my family."

Related: Eva Mendes Talks Being a Stay-at-Home Mom: 'Nobody Told Me It Was Gonna Really Be a Job'

That shift in focus has resulted in a years-long break from acting for Mendes, who — other than voicing a yoga instructor in the children’s series Bluey in 2021 — last appeared in Gosling’s 2014 fantasy thriller Lost River. 

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

Another source has said Mendes and the “I’m Just Ken” singer "very much enjoy family time" with their daughters. "When they are not working, they are all about their girls.”

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