BROKEN EMBRACES:'She makes Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth look like lollipop ladies.' DONALD CLARKEmeets the stunning siren, Spanish actor Penélope Cruz
OH MY GOD! Have you seen the poster for the new Pedro Almodóvar film? It is just fabulous. There's not much on it except the title, Broken Embraces, and a digitally modified, vaguely pop-art image of Penélope Cruz. But what a picture. With her hair post-coitally tousled and her eyes straining to shake off ropes of mascara, she appears to have been marinated in essence of movie star. Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth seem like lollipop ladies in comparison.
Broken Embraces, another twisty gem from Almodóvar, has much to do with the nature of movie stardom. Cruz plays an anguished call girl who, after hooking up with a wealthy sugar daddy, secures a starring role in a camp comedy and falls fatally in love with its director. Placing various glamorous wigs on her head, encouraging her into melodramatic scenarios, wrapping her in crumpled sheets, Almodóvar makes it clear that he views Penélope as a kind of uber-idol (or whatever the Spanish version of that might be).
Fair enough. In the decade and a half since she broke ground in the outrageous Jamón, Jamón, the Spanish actor, now 35, has served her time on the thespian treadmill. She was incandescent in several fine Almodóvar films – notably Live Fleshand All About My Mother– and worked her way through a mixed bag of Hollywood fare, before, early this year, winning an Oscar for her turn in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Even that surprisingly lengthy, slightly queasy dalliance with Tom Cruise failed to retard the ascent of her star.
Penélope Cruz has arrived. Literally. Sauntering across the room, she plonks herself unenthusiastically onto the recently plumped sofa. Is she having fun?
“This is not my favourite part of the job,” she almost shrugs. “But it’s not so bad.”
Here’s the thing. Compact and pointy, Penélope is certainly an attractive woman and, now a very decent English speaker, she does have a sort of unobtrusive, blasé charisma. But she’s not nearly as fabulous as her poster. If she sat beside you at an airport you’d probably manage to remain largely unflustered by her presumed magnificence.
“Pedro is a very generous director,” she begins. “He gives us time to prepare. He is passionate about movies to the extent that they are the only things in his life. I never want to disappoint him.”
When, in 2006, after a few distinctly dodgy American films, she returned to work with Almodóvar in the superb Volver, too many writers suggested that she was "recharging her batteries". Was that a silly cliche?
“No. Not at all,” she says. “But I never want to disappoint him. When I am working with him, I always try harder than with other directors not to disappoint him because he is my friend. So, in an odd way, it’s less relaxed working with him.”
Unclenching slightly, Cruz goes on to further discuss the special connection she shares with the great man. She is becoming distinctly more relaxed, but I think the table need not fear that it will be danced upon any time soon.
Penélope Cruz Sánchez was born into an ordinary family from a largely working-class suburb of Madrid. Always a performer, she initially wanted to be a dancer and worked hard at classical ballet throughout her adolescence. At some point in her mid-teens, however, she suddenly got the urge to declaim and inclined herself towards the appropriate education.
“Yes. Growing up, since I was four, I did ballet,” she says. “Then, at 13, I decided to go to a theatre school at night. Then, at 17, I did my first big movie. When that first day was over, I felt I was completely hooked. There was a feeling that took hold of me that has never gone away.”
That film was Bigas Luna's famously saucy Jamón, Jamón, during which Cruz had lots of vigorous sex – most spectacularly beneath a huge wooden bull – with the lithe, charismatic Javier Bardem. The film certainly had a significant effect on Cruz's later life. Her career surged forwards and, some years later, she hooked up romantically with Bardem. They are together now, but (as we shall see) you will learn little about that relationship in these pages.
Jamón, Jamónwas a risky project for such a young woman to consider. The film turned out to be a worldwide hit, but, what with all that lubricious coupling, it could easily have turned into a serious embarrassment.
“Maybe. But it was a very well-written character and a very good script. I am a very big fan of Bigas, so I was confident. The movie was very successful in Spain. Then I did a film called Belle Époque, which couldn’t have been more different, and things really changed.”
We sometimes assume that the ambition of all actors from all cultures is to succeed in Hollywood. Yet plenty of Spanish, French and German performers make a perfectly good living without ever becoming Robin Williams’s straight man or the evil megalomaniac trying to decapitate Bruce Willis. Was America in the back of Penélope’s mind in the early years?
"No, not at all, because from an early age that idea just seemed like science fiction to me," she says. "In fact when I became an actress in Spain and was able to work all the time, even that seemed incredible. It just came about in a natural way. An agent saw Belle Époqueand Jamón, Jamónand asked if I might be interested in work in America. Of course I was. I went there with a return ticket and expected to come straight home."
Her first American film was Stephen Frears's latter-day western The Hi-Lo Countryin 1998. She now admits that it was a difficult experience. She didn't have a sure grasp of English and had some trouble following the intricacies of the script. But Cruz is not a quitter, and when the opportunity arrived to star opposite Johnny Depp in Blow, a biopic of the drug smuggler George Jung, she didn't pause too long before scribbling on the dotted line.
“Yes, the biggest pressure was that I didn’t know a lot of English,” she says. “When working with Stephen I didn’t really know 50 per cent of what was going on. I had very little vocabulary. All that made me stronger, though. I didn’t want to say no to any opportunity, so I went to study English in London and New York.”
She spent a few months living in a modestly posh bit of north London, I believe.
“Yes. Belsize Park. It’s very nice up there, actually.”
I get the impression that she worked darn hard during the early part of her career. Crossing the Atlantic every few weeks, she seems to have attended every audition that she was offered and strolled down every red carpet that wanted her.
“Well, this business is difficult because you always depend on other people’s decisions,” she says. “But I was very lucky. I kept doing auditions. I kept getting roles. I was a workaholic. The last few years I have been more balanced. I have more equilibrium. Maybe I have some more time to myself.”
But she has not yet married. She is yet to have children.
“I don’t talk about that in interviews,” she says, without looking too stern. “I am sorry, but unfortunately that stuff gets on the internet and the strangest things get said.”
I’m sure she’s right. Gossip continues to buzz around her. Just three days after our conversation, several websites reported that Cruz was pregnant with Bardem’s baby. (I must confess that I don’t know what a mildly pregnant woman is supposed to look like and at time of writing, the rumours remain unconfirmed.)
The strangest, weirdest time for Penélope must, however, have been the early part of this decade. Sadly, none of her first few films in America were a success – remember the drippy Captain Corelli's Mandolin,the absurd Vanilla Skyand the truly appalling Gothika– and she became more famous for following wee Tom Cruise about at premieres than winning awards or burning up the screen.
It hardly needs to be said that there is no point asking Cruz anything about that relationship (still less raising any of the potentially libellous theories that surrounded it). But it would be interesting to learn how she set about coping with the constant stream of half-truths, innuendos and galloping lies.
“It is crazy. The internet can be our best friend or our worst enemy,” she says. “When we came to London yesterday, they lost my luggage. But they got it back in three hours. Now, Pedro said to a journalist as a joke – some journalists don’t have a sense of humour, I think – that maybe a fetishist had it and was going through my underwear. A few hours later all these websites were saying a fetishist had stolen my suitcase.”
She cackles for the first time in our conversation.“I have all my friends and all my people in Spain mailing me and saying: ‘Are you all right? Who is this fetishist who stole your luggage?’ I had to explain that it was okay. My bag was in my room.”
Whole divisions of the media now devote themselves to catching images of movie stars wearing bad pyjamas while buying pints of milk. I imagine that poor Ms Cruz must have to fling on the Vera Wang every time she runs out of yogurt or wants to buy a lotto ticket.
“No. I wouldn’t say that,” she says. “I like to dress up when I go to premieres or whatever, but that’s it. In normal life, I have a very hippie lifestyle. I wear jeans and trainers and so on. That’s how I normally look, anyway. So it’s not news.”
Anyway, after that juddering start in Hollywood, Cruz seems to have got her life nicely in order. As discussed earlier, her reunion with Almodóvar for Volverre-injected old energies into her career. Once again, she seemed fierce, glamorous and agreeably eccentric. The performance – all guttural anguish and flayed vowels – secured her an Oscar nomination and won her best actress at Cannes.
Then came Vicky Cristina Barcelona. She began palling around with Bardem on set and they ended up becoming an item. In February, she won the best supporting actress Oscar for her turn as Javier's noisy ex-wife.
You might (if you were being snitty) point out that the part does conform to a particular Hollywood stereotype of Spanish-speaking women – loud, exotic, crazy – but Cruz chewed the part into gristle with admirable relish. By the time the ceremony came round, following an absurdly prolonged awards season, she was already established as the runaway favourite.
“Well, even if everybody tells you are going to win, you never really know,” she says. “There are 6,000 people voting. There can always be a surprise. I didn’t know what to expect. I had no idea. I was so happy, because my family were all there. We had been to the Golden Globes, the Baftas, and so on, but there were so many of those, the family had to take turns. It was great to celebrate that last win with them all. The celebration lasted several weeks.”
So, where are we?
Cruz currently can be heard as the voice of a guinea-pig secret agent in Disney's G-Force. At the end of the year, she will join a staggering array of Oscar winners – Cotillard, Day-Lewis, Kidman, Dench, Loren – in Rob Marshall's version of the Broadway musical Nine.
All good stuff. But she must still worry about Hollywood’s habit of putting non-Anglophone actors into certain boxes. For too long, Spanish and Mexican actors could only play servants or villains.
“That was true, I’m afraid,” she says. “But it has really started to change in the last five years. Of course, it depends on me saying ‘no’ when a director is trying to put me in a box. No, I won’t do that.”
She shakes her head and makes a mock pout. There’s the old-fashioned movie star we were looking for. Fabulous!
Broken Embracesis on limited release from August 28th