Penélope Cruz is featured in the NY Times Great Performances portfolio. She’s being honored with a feature for her work in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Click on the link to listen to the commentary about her shoot.

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.

The cinema has never been an equal opportunity employer. From the beginning, a special advantage has been reserved for those few humans whose faces look good projected at a hundred times life size. These rare creatures, the sight of whom casts a magic spell over millions worldwide, are blessed with more than symmetry, a healthy smile, bright eyes, and good skin. As any casting director will tell you, those highly desirable qualities are nevertheless barely enough to get someone an audition. With the great icons of the cinema, figures like Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, and now Penélope Cruz, a kind of poetry of the flesh must be present, lending an emotional resonance to their beauty that implies something mysterious and desirable beyond the surface, and constitutes the aura of the genuine star.

Pe is nominated in the BAFTA longlist twice for leading actress for Elegy and supporting for Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Furthermore Vicky is up for original screenplay, Hall & Johansson for leading actress, Bardem for leading actor.

The BAFTA longlists include 15 contenders in each category, from which the five nominees will be chosen in the second round of voting. Once the nominees are finalized, the whole membership votes again to decide the best film, four acting prizes and film not in the English language. In all remaining categories, the members of each chapter (or jury) determine the vote.

The awards will take place Feb. 8 at London’s Royal Opera House.

Penélope Cruz glows at the 2008 New York Film Critic’s Circle Awards at Strata on Monday in New York City.

The 34-year-old actress won for Best Supporting Actress in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

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DVD Times and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment have announced the Region 1 DVD release of Elegy on 17th March 2009. Respected cultural critic and author David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) is a middle-aged college professor who, for years, has lived in a state of “emancipated manhood.” His romantic conquests are many; his lasting commitments, few. But when a stunning young student named Consuela Castillo (Penelope Cruz) enters his life, her otherworldly beauty captivates him to the point of obsession.

Features include:
1.85:1 Anamorphic Widescreen
English DD5.1 Surround
English subtitles
Commentary with Screenwriter Nicholas Meyer
The Poetry of Elegy

There is an interview with LA Times Ms Cruz from the Gotham Awards. Check it out!

A vintage treat! Pe for Spec magazine back some eight years ago. She has a bit of Consuela Castillo look in these! I absolutely love this set.

As the summer blockbuster season fades, the movie industry now moves into the end-of-the-year serious mode in which Academy Award-caliber films are released.

One of the early contenders has to be Elegy, based upon the Philip Roth short novel, The Dying Animal.

Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz lead a talented cast that includes Dennis Hopper, Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard. The movie’s explorations of the complexities of love and sex ultimately provide a somber tone despite some witty observations by the Hopper character, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet George O’Hearn.

“I wouldn’t describe myself as the most stable person,” says Penelope Cruz, who has played some of the movies’ more explosive, damaged and exciting women of the past decade. “I try. Who can say they’re stable? Maybe someone who’s enjoying a lot of mental peace, but I don’t know them.”

Calling from Madrid, where she is currently shooting director Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces, Cruz sounds somber. There is only a hint of the warm, passionate quality that she naturally exudes in face-to-face conversation, a quality that not surprisingly attracts her male co-stars and then, if a romance starts, the paparazzi.

The 34-year-old actress is tired of being more famous for her boyfriends – her exes include Tom Cruise and Matthew McConaughey – than her work. So she is in lockdown mode, poised to deflect questions about her current boyfriend, Spanish actor Javier Bardem, who earlier this year won an Oscar as best supporting actor for his work in No Country for Old Men (2007).