Penélope Cruz guest-edited next month’s French Vogue, which has three different covers.

One cover sees modern day screen legends Penélope, Kate Winslet, Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep, Gwyneth Paltrow and Naomi Watts. All the ladies are wearing (RED) clothing, designed to eliminate AIDS in Africa.

While on the other covers, she poses as the other half of Bono’s face, and finally, she toplessly embraces Meryl Streep.

I do not have access to this magazine but I’m hoping we will have scans soon. Please consider donating the other various Pe covers if you manage to obtain and scan them – it would be tremendously appreciated! I can’t wait to see the inside contents!

Last year she was photographed with Woody Allen and this year she’s with her idol Pedro Almodóvar. You can also view the photoshoot in this past update.

Frame, Set, and Match
The Romantics
Pedro Almodóvar with Penélope Cruz

Four films together: Live Flesh (1997), All About My Mother (1999), Volver (2006), and Broken Embraces (2009).

Broken Embraces has a valedictory feel to it, or at least it conveys a sense that the 60-year-old Almodóvar—a man for whom it was once compulsory to use the words enfant terrible—is taking stock of his life. The movie is about a filmmaker, cruelly robbed of sight, who recounts to a young man the tragic story of his greatest love: a stunning beauty he rescued from the gilded clutches of kept-womanhood. There are stylistic nods to the 1950s weepie-meister Douglas Sirk and to Michael Powell’s sick-joke movie Peeping Tom. There are glimpses of the movie that the director made with his doomed love, a Day-Glo bauble that harkens back to Almodóvar’s youthful 1980s “wacky” period. And there is Cruz. Almodóvar uses his fractured narrative to frame her in all manner of looks and ways: in a Marilyn wig, in drab secretarial gear, in the Chuck Close–like pixelation of enlarged, super-slo-mo playback … all in the cause of proving that the camera loves her as much as ol’ Pedro does.

Photographed in New York City on December 17, 2009.

Shepperton Studios, London, on a bleak December day. Shrouded in a freezing fog, the lot seems faintly neglected, as though abandoned. The various buildings—prop shops, costume houses—look like little more than sheds. A car drops me off at a side door to a soundstage, where a harried but friendly publicist meets me.

Inside, it’s as though a magician has waved his wand. Suddenly I am transported half a century back in time to the Italy of La Dolce Vita. To my left is an empty set-within-a-set of a Roman piazza, and to my right is a bustling re-creation of a 1960s movie studio. An intricate scaffolding of iron balconies and stairwells has been built in front of the corrugated walls of the soundstage. Nowhere, it turns out, could be more perfect for Rob Marshall to direct the song-and-dance numbers for Nine, his latest movie, because the bones of Shepperton have an uncanny resemblance to the Cinecittà of Fellini’s 8½, the inspiration for Maury Yeston’s 1982 Broadway musical Nine, on which this film is based.

Bang ahead of me, Daniel Day-Lewis, playing the lead, Guido, is dressed in a forties-style waistcoat, a white shirt, and beige pants. Nine is Guido’s story—the tale of a legendary director who can’t find a subject for his next film or a way to control the many women in his life. Day-Lewis is seated on a crane, “directing” a scene.

I stand and watch for a while. Well, actually, I stare in a fanlike manner, rather than a professional-Vogue-journalist kind of manner. Day-Lewis’s cheekbones are as mesmerizing as his acting, and his performance is so intense he literally is his character. Suddenly an arm appears and gently repositions me about two yards to the left. “Could you please move out of Daniel’s eye line, Miss Sykes?” asks a crew member. I am politely informed that since Day-Lewis is a Method actor, he doesn’t like to see anyone besides cast and crew while he is working. Nor would I, if I were taking on a role originally played by the iconic Marcello Mastroianni. (On Broadway, Guido was played by Raúl Juliá in 1982 and Antonio Banderas in 2003.)

No matter; there is plenty else to look at—and what a show it is! Behind Day-Lewis, the scaffolding is peopled with 100 extras and 24 dancers, immaculately choreographed and dressed in glittering gradations of white: Dancers in flapper dresses preen on the stairwells; girls in corsets flirtatiously drape themselves over the balconies; buxom ladies in bustiers and hot pants twirl giant fluffy ostrich-feather fans. This is the spectacular, over-the-top ensemble number “Folies Bergeres”: Guido’s imagination come alive.

One by one, six of the seven leading ladies in Guido’s life appear through a doorway high up in the rafters and slink down the stairs, positioning themselves languorously around the set. First, to the grand orchestral music of the “Overture Delle Donne,” the singer Fergie, who plays Saraghina, a prostitute, appears in a gray, corseted frock, all cleavage and russet hair, her eyes kohled into a smudgy, sexy mess. She is followed by Kate Hudson, perky as ever, in a white fringed sixties minidress and go-go boots, her blonde tresses teased into tumbling curls. The outfit perfectly suits her character, Stephanie, a Vogue journalist. Next, Judi Dench, playing costume designer Lily, appears clad in black and smoking a cigarette. Then comes a saucy Penélope Cruz, as Guido’s mistress, Carla, in a polka-dot cocktail dress that gives her the silhouette of a fifties pinup. Nicole Kidman follows, striking a powerful pose in a nude-colored strapless, sparkling gown as movie star Claudia, Guido’s inspiration and obsession. Finally, an astoundingly well-preserved Sophia Loren, playing Guido’s mother, makes her entrance, leaning over the balcony and shooting a stern but loving look toward Guido far below. (Marion Cotillard, who plays Guido’s long-suffering wife, Luisa, is not in this scene.)

“You could call it an iconfest,” I scribble in my notes. Then, rather unimaginatively, I add “razzle-dazzle-pizzazz musical great antidote to misery-gloom-doom of credit crunch” before, thankfully for the reader, I am diverted by the whisper “Ciao! Plume!” from behind me. I turn to see a vision of toffee-colored Loro Piana cashmere before me—Mr. Valentino and his partner, Giancarlo Giammetti.

“We’re here to see Sophia,” explains Giammetti. “She said to me, ‘It’s the best movie I’ve ever done.’ ” Mr. Valentino adds, “She said, ‘It’s the most expensive movie I’ve ever done.’ ” From the rear, producer Harvey Weinstein, dressed in a white shirt and black pants, booms, “Judi Dench said to me, ‘I have to make Ten and Eleven!’ ” Just then, Pedro Almodóvar walks by, plus entourage, in search of Penélope Cruz’s dressing room. I scrawl “icon overload” on my legal pad.

A few minutes later I find myself climbing a very steep ladder up to a small stage where Rob Marshall has been perched for most of the last twelve weeks. Dressed in dark jeans and a navy sweatshirt, Marshall, 49, is good-looking—and dead serious. He has four screens to monitor and multiple cameras, and is shouting directions at the actors, who are repeating the scene over and over. The only line in the scene comes at the end, when Day-Lewis says, “Action!”

The pressure doesn’t faze Marshall, who is thoroughly enjoying himself. “I was born in the wrong time,” he says, sighing. “I wish I’d lived in the MGM era, when they churned out musical films one after another.” An ex-dancer and choreographer whose exhaustive résumé includes codirecting, with Sam Mendes, a revival of Cabaret that won four Tonys, and directing the movie Chicago, which won six Oscars, Marshall is in his element. “One of the joys of working on a musical is that you rehearse for two months. You actually get to create a company, which you never do usually in film,” he says.

Still, even a multiple-Oscar-winner cannot escape the provenance of Nine and the expectations that it brings. Fellini’s 8½—so called because it was, literally, Fellini’s eight-and-a-halfth film—which was released in 1963, is extraordinarily iconic to moviemakers because of the surreal and beautiful way it dealt with the subject of creative procrastination. To the fashion crowd, 8½ is simply a diabolically stylish movie that defines 1960s European chic. The curvaceous women of 8½ are clad in shockingly sharp shift dresses, demure gloves, and enormous, veiled hats from under which their immaculately lined eyes gaze blankly out. Shot in cool, grainy black-and-white, 8½ starred the sexiest actresses of the day, including Anouk Aimée and Claudia Cardinale. “This movie is not a remake of 8½!” exclaims Marshall nervously. “I could never remake that movie in half a million years. I could never touch Fellini and the brilliant, genius masterpiece of all time.”

A break is announced, and Weinstein escorts me back down to the set to meet the actresses, who are chatting while they wait for the next take, Penélope and Kate dwarfed by the ethereal-looking Nicole in her glittering gown. Her hair, colored a beautiful shade of palomino, is curled and immaculately pulled back from her forehead, and her clear blue eyes and pillar-box-red lips are like exclamation points against her alabaster skin, showing off the enormous Chopard diamonds around her neck to perfection. I tell her I cannot believe she had her baby, Sunday Rose, only six months ago. “My baby gives me energy. I don’t feel tired,” says Nicole. Claudia was played by Claudia Cardinale in 8½. I can’t resist asking Nicole how she feels about being a movie icon playing a movie icon who was once played by an Italian movie icon. “No!” she insists. “I’m not playing Claudia Cardinale. Even when I played Virginia Woolf I didn’t take the real woman into account.” Nevertheless, Marshall says he picked Kidman for the role because “when Claudia comes on, she has to be the iconic film star, and Nicole has really attained that in her life.”

Nicole turns to Kate, who has covered her costume with a white terry robe. Her feet are now clad in a pair of UGG boots. “Kate should be on Broadway,” says Nicole. “She should be the lead.” Kate’s eyes sparkle with excitement when she talks about her number “Cinema Italiano,” which was written especially for her by Yeston. “I spent most of my childhood singing and dancing and just never had the chance to do it professionally. So when I got the chance to work with Rob, I was so excited, I was out of my mind.”

Hudson tells me that rehearsals felt like “being at summer camp,” although she adds, “I don’t think there is any actress who looks forward to missing those days with her kids. But at the same time there is no one who wants to stop acting.” Nicole admits, “I had no desire to work after I had my daughter, but to lure me back, this movie was the only way.”

Penélope also plans to work less in the future. She says that she is so often cast in tortured-female parts that she needs to put in more and more energy and time to play them. “Luckily I don’t have to identify with my roles, because if I did I would be dead by now!” she says with a laugh. “I’ve been working since the age of seventeen, and I really haven’t stopped. I want to balance it a little more. Instead of making three or four movies a year, I will do one.”

Still, it isn’t as though the girls haven’t had fun. Penélope loved living in the same apartment building as Kate and Fergie. “I’ve had some very long dinners with Kate, because she loves eating,” she says. “I mean four-hour dinners. We are exercising so much we don’t feel guilty at all.” Fergie then walks over and adds that because she had to gain weight for her part, she stopped working out and “started eating crap. I ate everything fried.”

Later I visit the wardrobe department, which turns out to be an entire floor of another building. There are so many racks of forties frocks, sequined gowns, and beaded dresses that I literally can’t see where they end. Costume designer Colleen Atwood, who won an Oscar for Memoirs of a Geisha (directed by Marshall), had a fashion challenge on her hands with Nine: The film is set in the sixties, but the women in Guido’s life go back to the mid-twenties, so the costumes had to reflect all the different eras. Colleen used vintage clothes for the extras but created all the period looks for the principals because they had to sing and dance in them—350 costumes and 200 pairs of shoes in all. She sewed couture-like corsets for Nicole Kidman to give her the silhouette of a goddess and was inspired by a print from a sixties Pucci purse to make a blouse for Kate Hudson. “We have given you a major fashion moment,” says Marshall. Even the period lingerie for the women was handmade, whether it was frilly garter belts or satin-and-lace bras.

In the makeup studio, I meet Peter Swords King, Oscar-winning hair and makeup designer, who has a team of 28 working with him. The walls are covered in inspirational black-and-white photos of sixties stars like Monica Vitti, Brigitte Bardot, and Julie Christie. “Those girls always looked like they just got out of bed—in a good way,” says Peter, confiding that authentic bedroom hair is achieved by running your fingers through your hair instead of brushing it, after you curl it. “I was completely inspired by the Italian New Wave-film look—Sophia Loren and Claudia Cardinale.” As for the makeup, think false eyelashes, eyeliner, and pancake foundation. “There’s something incredibly sexy about the dark eyes and the pale lips,” says Marshall. “That era worshipped the beauty of women.”

A few minutes later Weinstein picks me up in a chauffeur-driven car. En route, he tells me, “I’ve made more than 100 movies, but I’ve never, ever made a movie like this. I’ve been working on Nine for nearly five years,” he says. “It’s been a real passion of mine since I saw the original with Raúl Juliá.” When we arrive at the office the first clip I see is Penélope performing “A Call from the Vatican,” which she sings wearing a white satin-and-black lace teddy and fishnets. It’s sexy and fun. Kate Hudson’s go-go-dancing turn is more than a little reminiscent of her mother, Goldie Hawn, in the sixties comedy-sketch show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Finally, I see Marion Cotillard singing “My Husband Makes Movies” while performing a dazzlingly chic striptease. When I talk to her by phone a few weeks later, Marion, who speaks with a delightful French accent, tells me, “It’s been my dream to do an American musical. When I was a child, Annie was my favorite. I just never thought I would get to do it.” Of playing opposite Daniel Day-Lewis, Cotillard says, “It’s easy to work with such an amazing artist.” Because he was always in character, “it gives an energy to the crew. He creates this desire in everyone to be at their best.”

At five o’clock, I go back to the set, where it’s a wrap. The soundstage is littered with the debris of moviemaking—giant wind machines, a double-decker bus, bunches of cables, a child’s bed, lampshades. Actors rush for their coats and bags. A troupe of good-looking extras dressed as priests in white cassocks say goodbye to one another, looking slightly deflated now that it’s all over. Sophia Loren walks alone to her dressing room, a fat mink coat draped over her costume against the cold. A dancing girl covers herself in a dull green mackintosh and heads home. The spell is broken—I am reminded of the bleak London day outside, and venture out into the mist.

Source: Vogue

What do you think? I’m honestly not loving the cover and a bit let down, although I think Penélope by far looks the best! I’m still really excited to see what’s on the inside though! Stay tuned for scans.

Some years ago, when Penélope Cruz was still on her way up the movie-star ladder, I had a behind-the-scenes adventure with her that gave me a chance to see what the Spanish actress is made of. I had arranged for her to do a cover shoot for Interview, the magazine I then edited, and on the day of the shoot I got a call from the photographer, who was freaking out. She had planned a bunch of fun setups, but the day hadn’t even begun yet and now Cruz’s minders were demanding that the photographer make it snappy: there wasn’t time to do anything but a few basic shots. The huffs and snits were about to spoil the shoot, so I headed over to the location, a nightclub on 14th Street, to see if I could fix things. I quickly sussed out the real reason Cruz’s people were trying to cut the shoot short: she had been summoned for a meeting later that same day with the other Cruise, as in Tom, who back then, in 2000, was still considered Mr. It. I got nowhere with her Spanish rep—apparently our rinky-dink photo shoot was chopped liver in comparison with a meeting with Hollywood’s top gun—so I marched into hair and makeup, where the actress was getting spiffed up for the first picture, and pleaded our case directly. She looked horrified that we’d been made to feel rushed and small, and asked me to tell our photographer that she was honored to be working with her and was committed to posing for all the images she wanted.

The shoot proceeded and the Cruz team backed off till many hours later, when they just couldn’t stand by anymore. “Penélope is very late for her meeting,” one of them complained, explaining that it was to be at the Carlyle hotel, all the way uptown. “Just one more picture,” begged our photographer. This was to be the money shot—an image of Cruz in a tart-yellow Cadillac convertible. Cruz’s people had had it. But still game, and in an effort to keep everyone happy, the actress suggested a bit of multi-tasking: she’d do the photo in the car while it was being driven uptown for her appointment. Perfect solution!

We all rushed outside, only to discover that the vehicle was a mere prop—it didn’t have an engine. (Our budgets were tight, so the photo editor had rented the cheapest Caddy possible.) Someone had the brain wave to put the car back up on the flatbed that had brought it there and drive the whole Rube Goldberg contraption up to the Carlyle. Anybody on Madison Avenue that evening would have caught the hilarious sight of Cruz languishing in a hot-pink Versace dress in the backseat of a car that had been jacked up on the flatbed, surrounded by flashes popping like fireworks. Some of us followed in a car.

The truck pulled up to the Carlyle and Cruz was set free. She flew through the revolving door and into the elevator—at which point I screamed, “You still have the Versace on—we need to give it back!” Penélope jumped out of the elevator and into the ladies’ room off the hotel’s lobby. There, in record time, she did a quick change into her own clothes, handed over the dress, and was back in the elevator with her agent, going up to the floor where her now historic meeting awaited. The whole scene was worthy of a film by her greatest director, Pedro Almodóvar.

Since then I’d run into Cruz a few times (even watched a flirty moment between her and Prince at an awards dinner in L.A.), but we hadn’t really had a chance to talk until we got together for this article. I reminded her of our crazy escapade together and asked her what happened that evening at the Carlyle when she finally opened the door and met Tom Cruise. Not that there was a direct cause-and-effect, but as anybody who follows the real-estate market in Los Angeles will recall, it wasn’t long before Tom was packing up his pj’s and the then Mrs. Cruise, Nicole Kidman, had the family house to herself; soon after that, Tom and Penélope were going in and out of their own driveway. Cruz already had a few American films on her résumé—she’d turned heads as a coked-up sexpot in Blow, opposite Johnny Depp—but the romance with Cruise made her something of a household name in America and put a whole different spin on her image. So I’d long pictured any number of scenarios unfolding on that first evening. Dim the lights. Music, please. Tom seducing Penélope with an invitation to race go-carts or learn how to pilot his plane? Penélope sliding the do not disturb sign on the suite’s front door and throwing Tom onto that big cushy Carlyle bed? Scientology honchos landing on the roof of the Carlyle with their e-meters to measure Penélope’s aura before anybody got any big ideas?

If only it were that interesting. But nope—it seems it was just another night of deal-making. “Tom and Cameron Crowe and, I think, Paula Wagner were there,” says Cruz, remembering a triumvirate of actor, director, and producer. “That evening was when they told me they wanted me to do Vanilla Sky. I was very happy to hear it because I had done Open Your Eyes“—the 1997 Spanish film upon which Vanilla Sky is based—“and I really wanted to do the movie and do it with them.”

It’s funny how things work out. At the time this high-profile job may have seemed like a coup for Cruz, but let’s be honest: I’d rather have gum surgery—even by Cruz, one of whose big lines in the film was “Truthfully, I also work mornings as a dental assistant”—than see that creepy excuse for a film again, a rare misstep for Crowe. It was hardly a move up for Cruz, who was widely panned, not that the script gave her much of a chance. Then again, at least in terms of ambition, Vanilla Sky was something of a peak in Cruz’s early Hollywood career, which also included the likes of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Gothika, All the Pretty Horses, Sahara, and Bandidas. Some of her American films may have looked good on paper, with impressive talent attached, but to varying degrees they just didn’t have it, even though Cruz never disses them. Hollywood, in the view of one director, “didn’t know what to do with her.”

From today’s perspective—when Cruz is at the top of her game, in demand in Europe and the States, both critically respected and, increasingly, a box-office draw—the disappointing days seem long ago indeed. With phenomenal performances in some recent winners, including last year’s Woody Allen gem, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, thanks to which she now has an Oscar on her mantel, Cruz is poised to become a new member of the tiny firmament of actresses who began their careers in a language other than English and went on to become truly international stars: the Marlene Dietrichs, Greta Garbos, Ingrid Bergmans, Sophia Lorens, Anouk Aimées, Catherine Deneuves, Jeanne Moreaus, and Liv Ullmanns. Like some of those actresses, Cruz isn’t cookie-cutter pretty—she even has a bit of a schnoz—but her unusual features come together in a memorable aria of real beauty. As Woody Allen says, “I don’t like to look at Penélope directly. It is too overwhelming.”

This month, he’ll have to work hard at ducking her. Cruz will be showing off her talents in two highly anticipated films, one European, one American, very different in tone but which share a theme: Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces, a love letter to the art (versus commerce) of filmmaking, which represents her fourth collaboration with the Spanish director; and Rob Marshall’s all-star singing, dancing, showstopping Nine, a tale about a film director’s artistic crises and his refound passion for making movies. This twofer—continued respect in her own country and ever rising stardom in the States—is big news for Spanish performers. In the past only Spanish-American Rita Hayworth (born Margarita Carmen Cansino) got anywhere near stardom in Hollywood, and changing her name was just the beginning of what she had to do.

Such a rarefied, coveted position in the entertainment world would have seemed way beyond her reach when Penélope was a little girl growing up in the 1970s and 80s in Alcobendas, just outside Madrid, watching her parents break their backs trying to provide the basics for the family. There were three kids, Penélope, then Mónica, and eventually Eduardo. Both parents worked six days a week—her dad, Eduardo, in the family hardware store; her mother, Encarna, at her own hair salon. Penélope was very much “on watch” at the salon, where she and Mónica hung out every day. She says, “It was my first acting school. I would pretend to be doing my homework, but I was really observing the women. I found their behavior mesmerizing—what they were hiding, how they left feeling a little different after they’d been helped to become a little more like whom they wanted to look like. They treated the place a little bit like a psychologist’s office. They would share all their secrets.”

It sounds like Penélope herself was always something of a performer. When I asked Mónica if there was any incident from their childhood that might have foreshadowed what her sister would become, she replied, “Now, when we watch videos from when we were little we fall about laughing because it was so obvious. Whenever Penélope appeared in front of the camera she was acting or singing or dancing or all of them at once.”

By the time Cruz entered high school, in 1987, she was taking the bus or metro into the city at night to go to ballet classes. Sometimes she’d figure out how to finagle a ticket to whatever movie was showing at the nearby cinema (at 13 she was still too young to be allowed to see some of them officially). She was already an Almodóvar fan, having watched his earlier movies over and over on the family Betamax—“the darker they were, the more interested I was”—and one night in 1990 she caught his Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, a loony kidnapping/love story/sex-and-bondage caper starring Victoria Abril. That was it. Epiphany time. “That was the day I decided to be an actress,” Cruz says. “I fell in love. I’d found what I wanted to do. I really didn’t want to have to be in an office. I was a good student, but not happy. I thought, I have nobody in my family and no friends who can make a living out of anything related to an artistic profession, but I want to try. I decided to look for an agent.”

Hound an agent is more like it. Apparently she was and is still a bit of a bossy thing—“In our family,” Mónica says, “all the women have a little sergeant in them.” Penélope did her research and looked up Katrina Bayonas, who remains her agent to this day. But after her first audition, Bayonas turned her away for the simple reason that Cruz was too young. “She said, ‘Go home and come back in a few years,’” remembers Cruz with a laugh. “I came back the next week and auditioned again.” A third try, not long after, did the trick.

Her first two movies, both released in 1992, were Belle Epoque, a costume drama, and Bigas Luna’s Jamón, Jamón (variously translated as A Tale of Ham and Passion; Ham, Ham; and, my favorite, Salami, Salami). The latter was a jaw-dropper—a wild and crazy concoction of camp, kitsch, melodrama, humor, class politics, and a whole lot of sex, starring a decidedly studly Javier Bardem and a va-va-va-voom Cruz, who turned 17 during the filming, having lied about her age to the producers to get the part, and lied again to her parents about the nature of the picture to win their approval. In the film, she and Bardem make the phrase “on-screen chemistry” seem mild. Call the fire brigade! (The heat seems to sizzle offscreen too: Cruz and Bardem are now very much a couple.) Her bold, unself-conscious embrace of a role that required her to show a lot of skin and schnog or schtup more than her fair share of the film’s men surprised a lot of people, including her idol, Almodóvar, who made a congratulatory call and brought her in to read for his 1993 film Kika. Cruz says she was very nervous auditioning a scene in the director’s kitchen, but that didn’t stop her from characteristically trying to convince him she was old enough to play the main character, who was supposed to be more than twice her real age. Almodóvar, no monkey, didn’t buy it, but made it plain he wanted to work with her in the future.

The next four years saw Cruz acting in a dozen European movies as well as spending a couple of years in New York City taking ballet classes, going to the gym, shopping at D’Agostinos (which she still loves), and taking English lessons. She had her eye on making it on the bigger American stage, but at the same time her anonymity in Manhattan must have been a relief after half of Spain had seen her nipples in Jamón, Jamón. Besides, how could anyone miss the charms of New York living opposite an old-time gay bar in the West Village called Two Potato, as Cruz did? Perfect training for the next Almodóvar call.

In 1996, when the director handed her a role in Live Flesh—a young prostitute with a big personality who gives noisy, painful, primal birth on a public bus on the way to the hospital—the result was unforgettable, and the beginning of a collaboration as essential to movie history as the hookup between George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn or Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. Cruz’s knockout performance—so vulnerable and visceral and sad—takes up the first eight minutes or so of Live Flesh, and then she is gone, but she stays in the mind. Even Almodóvar got more than he was counting on. “She had a kind of strength that was earthy and eternal—surprising in someone so young,” he says. “Many people have told me that they called her after that because they were so impressed by those eight minutes. Eight minutes of real talent is a lot. Judi Dench won an Oscar for those eight minutes in Shakespeare in Love.”

This collaboration came to full flower in her next Almodóvar project, 1999’s All About My Mother, the director’s highly personal, contemporary version of an old-fashioned “women’s film.” Cruz’s ability to carry off the wild twists of plot and tone—the mark of any Almodóvar film—is absolutely convincing. She shows a perfect ear for comedy, but when her character, a young nun in training who is pregnant with the child of a sexed-up transvestite, weeps as she finds out that the oaf has made her H.I.V.-positive, it breaks your heart.

And then came her first foray into Hollywood, though it’s not as if Cruz turned her back on Europe. She remembers, “When I did my first movie in America, I already had my return ticket to Spain.” But the American films were a kind of test of how big a traditional Hollywood star Cruz could be. Whatever else they lacked, what those films did have were major leading men, which led to a sequence of major liaisons, reportedly including Matt Damon, Nicolas Cage, Matthew McConaughey, as well as Tom Cruise. The notion began to circulate around L.A. that she wasn’t safe with any leading man—or was it the other way around? She also struck up an enduring friendship with Salma Hayek; attempts by the industry to pit these two “spitfires” against each other for parts only strengthened their bond.

I asked Almodóvar what he thinks went wrong during her period of blah American films. While he’d rather not appear to be taking potshots at American filmmakers, many of whom he admires, he is a truth teller. He said, “It was bad luck for Penélope, because some of the movies were very ambitious, but this happens. They only saw her as a beautiful girl. It is the problem with the market, the agents, the studios, the film industry as a whole that labels actors in a way that is not very subtle at all. The problem is that it happened with 10 or 12 movies for Penélope, and it could have been the end.” Then he laughed: “But I was there to save her. I’m joking now.”

He may be joking, but in fact it was Almodóvar’s 2006 Volver that relaunched Cruz as an actress, not just a movie star. He has described his connection to Cruz during a movie’s shooting as if they “were bound together by a catheter.” Her performance as Raimunda—a daughter who is alienated from her mother and who, by the by, helps cover up her own daughter’s act of murder—was full of gravitas, humor, and surprises. Almodóvar even gave Cruz a prosthetic rear end, which was as transformative as the fake nose that Stephen Daldry gave Nicole Kidman when she played Virginia Woolf in The Hours. Volver earned Cruz a best-actress Oscar nomination—the first ever for a Spanish actress—and it also made other directors sit up and take notice, including Woody Allen, who wrote the part in Vicky Cristina Barcelona for her after seeing Volver. Cruz’s character in Allen’s film, Maria Elena, a painter who is a loose cannon as well as an irresistible temptress—she seduces her ex (Bardem; ah, him again) and then beds his new girlfriend (Scarlett Johansson)—really gave the actress room to show her stuff. She certainly did not hold back on the pheromones. Regarding her famous make-out session with Johansson, I asked who was better: Scarlett or Charlize Theron, whom Cruz smooched in the 2004 film Head in the Clouds. Cruz just laughed. “No matter how I answer that I will be in trouble. Both were pretty beautiful partners.”

Not only is Allen effusive in his assessment of Cruz’s ability, he also seems to have liked the woman herself, after his fashion: “I never thought about her as a person, because when I work I’m not interested in the person except as a performer. When she turned out to be lovely, that was nice, but I would have been O.K. if she had been a bitch.” Perhaps most consequential to Cruz’s career is the fact that Allen tuned in not just to her fieriness but to her fine comedic talent as well—the first American director to do so successfully. “She has a natural sense of humor,” he says. Because of Cruz’s looks and the fact that the camera loves her as much as it does, her comedic flair has often been left untapped. But she could just be the great 21st-century screwball talent, the Jean Harlow or Carole Lombard of our time.

Almodóvar uses this ability very much in his own way, in combination with her strengths as a dramatic actress. One sees Cruz walk a tightrope of emotions in Broken Embraces. Her character, Lena, is the girlfriend of a controlling bully with big bucks. She dreams of becoming an actress, so boyfriend finances a film for her. The only catch: she takes up with the director—with tragic consequences. Cruz plays Lena with a pitch-perfect combination of high drama and understated camp; it is one of the most demanding roles she has taken on. She says, “Pedro would push me to the limit. He really knows how to press all my buttons. You can only go into something like that when it’s somebody you really trust. I always feel like he’s my safety net. Like I can fly and go far, because he’s going to catch me. The biggest [panic] attack I had during the movie was the scene where, for the first time, Lena makes the decision to try to become an actress. I don’t know what happened to me that day, but before and after we filmed I could not breathe.” I wonder who she reminded herself of?

Cruz says the role she has always coveted is Carmen. I think of the moment in the opera when Carmen appears and the men ask her when she will love them. She replies, “Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame.” It may be Cruz’s refrain, too. No one has yet stepped up to the plate to let Cruz have a go at her favorite heroine, but when Rob Marshall’s Nine comes out, in November, audiences will have a chance to witness Cruz’s skills as a hoofer and gauge her gifts as a vocalist when she belts out the number “A Call from the Vatican.” The film, an adaptation of the 1982 Broadway musical, is a distant relative of Federico Fellini’s film 81?2—same story, very different feel. The company Cruz keeps in this mostly female cast is nothing to sneeze at: Sophia Loren, Nicole Kidman, Judi Dench, Marion Cotillard, Fergie, and Kate Hudson, with Daniel Day-Lewis holding it all together as the film director played by Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini’s semi-autobiographical original.

By all accounts Cruz fit right in with the international sisterhood that evolved during the shoot at Shepperton Studios, just outside London. In addition to bonding on set, the cast had its own evolving version of a sorority house—let’s call it Phi Beta Actress—with Loren, Cotillard, Fergie, and Cruz all shacking up in the same apartment building. Loren, for her part, is unstinting in her praise for Cruz. She says, “Penélope is very accurate in her work. She wants to be very precise about what the director wants. And she takes her career very seriously, which she should. I think she loves what she does and it shows on the screen. She has become a real friend. We talked a lot about life and our careers. I talked about De Sica, she talked about Almodóvar. When it was my last day she came to my dressing room. She was crying, and I was crying. This is the first time that I have left a film crying because we got so upset about leaving each other.”

Marshall says he considered Cruz for each of the female parts because of her range, but eventually he and she focused on Carla, the mistress—touching, loving, and a bit of a nutjob. Cruz seems to have wanted the filming to go on forever. Marshall remembers, “She’d be the last one in that soundstage working, and I’d have to say, ‘Penélope, it’s over.’ The day we were shooting her big song, ‘A Call from the Vatican,’ she was out there working so hard. In the middle of the number she does all this work with ropes—she was swinging on them and it was scary and she had formed calluses and her hands were bleeding. Daniel was screaming to her from the back of the soundstage that she is a warrior. We had told her she should wear gloves, but she was like, ‘No, no, no—I have to feel it.’ There’s this huge sheath of pink satin that she slides down on. When we finished the number she had disappeared behind the satin and was in tears. I said, ‘Are you unhappy with what you did?’ She said, ‘No, no. It’s that it is over, and I loved every second. I want to install ropes in my bedroom so I don’t have to let go of it.’?” The blisters were worth it. Cruz takes what could have been a generic tits-and-torch number and turns it into a highly personal tour de force.

‘Penélope was born to be an actress,” says Almodóvar, who knows her better than anyone in the business. “She is someone who is extremely emotional, and if she was not an actress it could be a problem for her. It’s luck she has chosen a profession that allows her to express something that would be too much for a normal person. Otherwise she would suffer a lot. And even now maybe she suffers too much.” Apparently this tendency goes way back. “I’ve always been a worrier,” says Cruz. “Since I was a little girl I’ve always felt that if I had a moment of peace I’d wonder: Are you sure you can afford to feel like this?”

This anxiety is fascinating, coming from someone who is so fearless on-screen. One senses it in the way she clams up when asked about Bardem. I knew she’d been mum about her high-profile assignations for years, so I was expecting her to forget her very good English when I went anywhere near the Pratesis. Still, I was surprised by her mantra-like response: We can’t go there …we can’t go there … It’s not that she pretends the relationship doesn’t exist—one can’t really do that successfully these days, not when everything ends up on the Internet, true and false. It’s more that she is protective of her privacy to a point that is striking, even for performers who don’t like to kiss and tell. (Her wariness of the press may date in part from the early notoriety she earned for Jamón, Jamón.) Her discipline about not even confirming what she knew I already knew—and what I knew that she knew I knew—was both touching and almost comic. There were long pauses and big eyes. (She slipped up only once. I brought up a U2 concert that she and Bardem had attended in Paris, mentioning that I’d heard she was playing air guitar during some of the songs. She squealed with delight, saying, “Javier is even better at air guitar!”) My most nosey Parker question—one that I felt it was my duty as a reporter to ask—was whether the widespread rumors that there was a wee Cruz-Bardem on the way were true. (The blogs have been a riot with their speculation about baby bumps and “strategically placed pleats.”) Here, unlike before, there was no telling silence from Cruz. Instead she answered in the negative but in a rather baroque, roundabout way, detailing how Almodóvar had tried, to no avail, to put that rumor to rest when a journalist asked him about it recently on a red carpet.

She and Bardem, who is famously private, are probably Spain’s two greatest living actors and they’re spicy, which makes them fodder for many a paparazzo’s long-range lens; they seem to be trying hard to figure out how to have a lasting relationship with each other, and not with the world as the third party, as so many Hollywood couples do now. But that doesn’t mean Cruz locks herself up in a tower. For our talks for this piece, she suggested we meet at the Boathouse in Central Park, a very public venue. I imagined her being pursued by tourists and us having to get in a boat to be able to talk in private. So instead, we ended up sitting in my back garden in Greenwich Village. But the boat capsizing would have been a perfectly Almodóvar-esque sequel to our adventure years ago with the flatbed. Penélope making a splash yet again.

Source: VF.com

“I’ve been obsessed with his cinema since I was a little girl, especially now, because now it is also a personal experience. He is a very important person in my life, not only in my career but also he is one of my best friends. If someone told me that I can only choose one director to work with for the rest of my life. It’s absolutely clear for me that it would be with him.” – Penélope Cruz

For the issue, actors were photographed with little make-up and hairstyling and with candid imagery. Cruz was photographed on the set of Nine, she’s seen rehearsing a dance number for the very first time! She’s also snapped back in New York before what would become her Gotham Award win. The images are stunning; just candid and gorgeous!

Other celebrities featured include Kate Winslet (honored for The Reader and Revolutionary Road), Robert Downey Jr. (Tropic Thunder and Iron Man), Kat Dennings (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist), Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler), Sean Penn (Milk), Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon). Winslet is on the cover.

PENÉLOPE CRUZ and WOODY ALLEN, The Odd Couple
One film together: Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008).
The archetypal Woody woman might be the over-educated, over-therapized yammerer—exemplified by Diane Keaton’s characters in Annie Hall and Manhattan—but another type of woman has also recurred in his work: the smoldering, emotionally volatile knockout. Think of Charlotte Rampling in Stardust Memories, Scarlett Johansson in Match Point, or, from Allen’s masterful short story “Retribution,” the Wasp goddess Connie Chasen, possessed of a “lewd, humid eroticism” and a body “the envy of a Vogue model.” In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Cruz takes on this assignment and then some—throwing in bits of Béatrice Dalle in Betty Blue and Emmanuelle Seigner in Bitter Moon for good measure. As María Elena, the tousled, pouty, impossibly sexy ex-wife of Javier Bardem’s painter character, Cruz is a whirlwind of carnality and psychosis. “You are de meesing ingredient,” she tells her ex’s new lover, an American naïf played by Johansson. “I get thees warm feeling when I hear you both locked in passion every night.” With Allen pulling the strings, you just know it’s not going to end well. Photographed at the Carlyle hotel, in New York City.

Hot on the heels of her first best-actress Oscar nomination, Spain’s Penelope Cruz is basking in some very sweet reviews for playing a stormy artist in Woody Allen’s dramedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona and a composed college student involved with her ambivalent professor in the drama Elegy.

And yet, she can’t sit through a single interview or stroll down a red carpet without the same question cropping up: What was it like kissing her Vicky Cristina co-star Scarlett Johansson?

“Always,” Cruz says with a sigh, raising her eyebrows, of inquiries about a quick yet potent scene that’s pivotal to the film. “Maybe if I was a journalist I would ask about it, too. But Scarlett and I have run out of things to say about it. We get asked 50 times a day.”

Right now, Cruz, 34, lacks the energy to whip up any pithy fabrications about their on-screen smooch in Allen’s tale of two New Yorkers (Johansson and Rebecca Hall) who spend a summer in Spain and become entangled with a local painter (real-life boyfriend Javier Bardem) and his unstable ex-wife (Cruz).

The film opens Friday and goes up against Cruz’s other project, Elegy, an intimate adaptation of Philip Roth’s novella The Dying Animal. Cruz is Consuela, a Cuban student who falls in love with her much older and very conflicted professor (Ben Kingsley).

Cruz has been doing publicity non-stop for both movies on both coasts. She just wrapped the thriller Los Abrazos rotos (Broken Hugs), her fourth film with her frequent collaborator Pedro Almodóvar.

“That’s why I’m tired. I don’t even know what my name is anymore,” she says, dipping into a bowl of miso soup.

A busy year

Still, she’s not complaining, she’s quick to point out. It has been a rich year for the actress, long a superstar at home in Spain and hailed for her work in Spanish-language films but frequently relegated to being eye candy in English-speaking movies.

Hollywood didn’t seem to know quite what to do with her, and for years she was more famous for her boyfriends (like Tom Cruise) than her performances. That’s finally changing.

“The only thing standing in her way was that she didn’t know the language well, but years have passed, and she has developed the language much better,” Allen says. “She’s going to be a perennial. She’s a great actress, like Sophia Loren. She’s very earthy, full of feeling, full of passion.

“If she chooses her parts wisely, she’ll be a great actress, and with her kind of looks, the kind of looks that age very well, she’ll be beautiful at 50 and 60.”

Thanks to her dual dramatic turns, “this is the first time people are taking her really seriously,” says Elegy director Isabel Coixet.

In Vicky Cristina, Cruz sizzles in both languages, berating Bardem in her native tongue while sparring with Johansson in English. In Elegy, she’s delicate and defiant as Kingsley’s paramour.

It’s a potent one-two punch for Cruz, even critics agree.

“Cruz has never done anything like this: with her downturned mouth and wild black hair, she looks witchy and unbeautiful,” writes the New Yorker’s David Denby of her turn in Vicky Cristina. New York magazine’s David Edelstein praises her “hilarious turn as a hellcat.”

EW’s Owen Gleiberman calls her “brilliant” in Elegy, and Variety’s Leslie Felperin says Cruz has “never been better in English.”

The only one who might question the kudos is Cruz herself. Coixet says Cruz would demand retake after retake, thinking she could always improve on something. “There were times I was like, ‘You’re exhausted.’ She’s a perfectionist.”

Allen goes one step further. “She doesn’t appreciate how terrific she is. She’s slightly insecure and thinks she’s not going to be able to do something well or that she needs extra takes to do it, which isn’t true at all.”

After 17 years of work, she gives credit for her current success to Almodóvar’s 2006 comedy Volver, in which she played a janitor with mother issues and earned a best-actress Oscar nomination.

“It was what happened with that movie. It was seen around the world and by the American industry that brought me other opportunities, like Woody’s movie. Movies that are in English and are very demanding emotionally.”

Though her clout has grown considerably, Cruz doesn’t put down any of her previous films, including duds such as 2005′s Sahara and 2001′s Vanilla Sky.

“The first movies I did in English, I was struggling more with English,” she says. “I’d studied French before, so in the beginning, I was learning my dialogue almost phonetically. But all of them come from me. I would never make less of these experiences. All of them mean a lot and taught me.”

Like so many actors, Cruz had dreamed of working with Allen, whose lore in Hollywood lives on. One day, she got a call to meet him, and the encounter lasted less than a minute. He’d seen her in Volver, was writing a script that might include a part for her and would let her know either way in a few weeks.

“He was very nice, but there is no (baloney) with Woody,” she says. “He’s very direct and honest and sometimes you cannot believe your ears. There’s no social veneer. It’s a very New York thing, but he has that more than anybody I know, and I really respect and appreciate that. He doesn’t waste energy.”

Allen says he always had Cruz in mind for Maria Elena. “She’s the Rolls-Royce of Spanish actresses. She’s very sexy and beautiful, she’s got the look, she’s got everything you want for that character. You believe her completely having those irrational mood swings. You believe she could stick a knife in Javier.”

But Cruz didn’t want to play the woman, an emotionally unstable painter, as a caricature.

“She thinks she will not be as creative if she’s not torturing herself, and she can’t get out of that pattern. That felt to me like somebody in a lot of pain, and I did not want to laugh at that pain. When I saw the movie in Cannes, they were laughing. And now, every time I see the movie, I laugh and relax and see the movie from the point of view of the audience.”

A fan of Philip Roth

There’s little to laugh about in Elegy, an often tense but tender drama.

“I’m happy that I did both movies back to back with characters that are so different,” Cruz says. “With Consuela, I was attached to the project for five years, since I read the book. I love Philip Roth, and it was one of the best books I’ve ever read. You read something, and almost every day of your life, you remember it. It means something to you.”

Like Consuela, “Penelope really admires people who know everything about culture and architecture and art. She’s a very passionate person, and her passion is in Consuela, too,” Coixet says. “When Penelope likes something, she really likes something. If it’s a song or a book or an author, she’s like, wow, totally flipping out.”

You don’t glimpse any of her fiery side in interviews, however. Cruz is thoughtful and focused.

She’s obviously giddy about one thing: finally doing a big-budget musical — Nine for Chicago director Rob Marshall, which she starts rehearsing in August for an October shoot. “I’m very excited. All the years I studied dance — 17 years — I get to use it here with the wonderful numbers Rob Marshall put together,” she says.

But otherwise, she’s somewhat reserved. She doesn’t pretend to be your friend or engage in idle banter about her favorite foods. She’s an avid reader, about to start Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. She gets cold easily and wonders why, especially in Manhattan, so many office buildings pump out overzealous air conditioning. She hopes Democratic contender Barack Obama wins the presidency.

And she’s serious about keeping her personal life under wraps. She will not discuss her relationship with her Vicky Cristina co-star Bardem. So undercover is Cruz that even Allen didn’t notice sparks flying between the two.

“They’re just very professional, always running their lines and practicing and practicing, something I never do,” he says. “They didn’t bother me. They’d sit in their makeup chairs and run their lines and practice scenes. All they did was work all the time.”

Those who know Cruz say she’s tremendously fun and loose in her personal life. “She loves karaoke. She’s really good at singing Lenny Kravitz songs and rap and hip-hop; she’s really good at P. Diddy songs,” Coixet says. “She eats a lot. She’s really skinny, but she eats a lot. There’s nothing dirty about her — and that’s dirty. She doesn’t even drink! It’s horrible.”

But the actress won’t divulge what she does for fun at home in Madrid. “I don’t feel like people really care what I do in my time to relax,” she says with a shrug. “It’s true that I spend a lot of time working. I was a workaholic, but now I am more balanced.”

She says she’s working on kicking back more and plans to do only one movie a year going forward — two, at most — to focus more on her off-screen life.

“It takes discipline for me to stop worrying in general. It has been in my nature always,” she says. “I’m as driven, or more, but about more specific things and appreciating the balance between the time for work and the time for yourself. You have to live.”

Source: USAToday.com