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 Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Outstanding Performer of the Year Award for 2009 goes to Penélope Cruz, in all the grace of her countenance’s exquisite thematic harmony. A classic beauty whose dark good looks and luminous brown eyes recall the Golden Age of Hollywood, the Spanish-born actress is in her mid thirties now, and both her career and her appeal have matured. The sensual excitement of her early years is still very much in evidence, but Cruz’s recent work is that of someone who knows not only that she is beautiful, but also what that can mean in a world where beauty is not the only important thing.

In the last three years, Cruz has gone from being a thinking man’s pin-up to something much less common: a world-class movie star. Her two films from 2008, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Elegy, have together brought her new accolades such as this one, along with a nomination for best supporting actress at the Golden Globes, and a shot at another nomination for the Academy Award, for which she was already nominated once, in the category of Best Actress for her 2007 role as Raimunda in Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver.

Cruz is a hard worker, known to directors and fellow actors alike for her intensity and perfectionism. Adaptable to a wide range of styles, she acts with equal effectiveness in Spanish and in English, and handles fast-paced shooting schedules and demanding leading roles with extraordinary artistic control and vision. Contemporary film acting is hardly a homogenous experience for someone operating on her level and traveling in these professional circles. Directors frequently take radically different approaches to the filmmaking process, and, as a result, comparable assignments don’t necessarily resemble one another.

For instance, compare Volver and Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Almodóvar rehearses for weeks or even months before shooting, whereas Allen often doesn’t rehearse his actors at all. Cruz is in nearly every scene of Volver, which runs just longer than two hours, and was required by Almodóvar to submit to an exacting set of rehearsals. On Vicky Cristina Barcelona, in which she plays Maria Elena—a gorgeous, romantic, and emotionally unstable Spanish artist—Cruz auditioned for the film by speaking with Allen for what she claims was “no more than 40 seconds.” She then waited a few weeks before receiving a script, which she studied on her own for several months before arriving on the set in Spain.

The intelligence and honor with which she invests Maria Elena is due to the power of the interpretation of the character that Cruz brought to the film. As the ex-wife of Javier Bardem’s character, the painter Juan Antonio, Cruz’s Maria Elena enters the story at the halfway point and still manages to steal every scene she’s in from the two formidable younger actresses who have been playing the leads from the start—Scarlett Johansson as Cristina and Rebecca Hall as Vicky. Johansson does a great job, but even Cruz’s silent reaction shots are more likely to elicit laughter than Johansson’s lines of dialogue.

At the film’s heart are two dazzling performances by Cruz and Bardem that put the English language to a fearsome test of mettle against its seemingly more expressive rival, Spanish. In the scenes at Juan Antonio’s studio when Maria Elena first arrives, she keeps speaking Spanish in front of Cristina, even though Juan Antonio expressly forbids her to speak anything but English out of politeness to his lover. The result is an intricate and amazing dance of words, with both Spanish characters crossing in and out of their native tongue in such elegant and unpredictable ways that the viewer is drawn ever deeper into their emotional world.

In Elegy, Cruz plays Consuela Castillo, a young Cuban woman who has an affair with her professor at Columbia, played by Ben Kingsley. Critics have been less unanimous in their praise for Elegy, but the growing consensus is that Cruz shows up Kingsley. Although the timely release of several trailers that indicated how willing Cruz remains to get naked in front of the camera may have had something to do with its gaining distribution in this country, in the end what people are buzzing about in relation to this picture is not Cruz’s nudity but her naturalism.

In fact, the fascinating thing about her recent roles is how lit up they are from within by Penélope Cruz’s singular talent. Perhaps it was something that happened when she absorbed the joyfully absurd aesthetic of her mentor Almodóvar, or maybe it is something that would have arrived on its own, but Cruz has begun to play these rather traditional roles in a way that is very special and that feels new. Constantly playing against any tendency to caricature her subjects, she describes her method as “defending what the character values and preserving her reality.” In the process of taking these women’s dilemmas to heart, Cruz melds drama and comedy into a complex and indivisible unity.

Her recent performances are exemplary of a development in genre that will only become more prevalent as film grows into the 21st century—movies acted as drama, but that play as subtle comedy. For directors like Almodóvar and Allen, this confluence of genre reflects a profound appreciation for the ways that human beings fail to achieve clarity about the most central issues in their lives.

A concern for the suffering of people who are confused by life and sex and love is something that Cruz shares with her directors, and her feeling for it informs her acting in both of the pictures being honored here in Santa Barbara. But what constitutes suffering in the life of one of the world’s most glamorous and successful women? One word—the Oscars. Being nominated two years ago was both the high point of Cruz’s career thus far and her most exhaustingly emotional ordeal as a celebrity. What with all the tension, and the chance that her nomination would remain just that—a nomination and not a statuette—there was only one thing for the nervous actress to do. On the way to the Academy Awards, already in her gown and jewels, Penélope Cruz stopped at In-n-Out and ordered a double-double. It’s that kind of carefree attitude that we can’t wait to share when she arrives in Santa Barbara for her tribute at the Arlington.

Penélope Cruz was be honored at SBIFF 2009 with the Outstanding Performer of the Year Award on Saturday, January 24, at the Arlington Theatre.

Source: SBIFF

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.

Leading Actresss
Angelina Jolie – Changeling
Anne Hathaway – Rachel Getting Married
Cate Blanchett – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Frances McDormand – Burn After Reading
Kate Winslet – Revolutionary Road
Kate Winslet – The Reader
Keira Knightley – The Duchess
Kristen Scott Thomas – I’ve Loved You So Long
Meryl Streep – Mamma Mia!
Meryl Streep – Doubt
Nicole Kidman – Australia
Penelope Cruz – Elegy
Rebecca Hall – Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Sally Hawkins – Happy-Go-Lucky
Scarlett Johansson – Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Supporting Actress
Amy Adams – Doubt
Charlotte Rampling – The Duchess
Elsa Zylberstein – I’ve Loved You So Long
Emma Thompson- Brideshead Revisited
Freida Pinto – Slumdog Millionaire
Judi Dench – Quantum of Solace
Julie Walters – Mamma Mia!
Kathy Bates – Revolutionary Road
Marisa Tomei – The Wrestler
Penélope Cruz – Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Rebecca Hall – Frost/Nixon
Tilda Swinton – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Tilda Swinton – Burn After Reading
Vera Farmiga – The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Viola Davis – Doubt

Source: Variety

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

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

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.

The script was written by Nicholas Meyer, who previously adapted the Roth novel The Human Stain featuring Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman. Meyer likely is more known to Trekkies for writing two of my favorite “Star Trek” movies, “The Wrath of Khan” and “The Voyage Home.”

Kingsley could be lining himself up for another Oscar nomination (he won for Gandhi back in 1983 and was nominated for best supporting actor for “Sexy Beast” in 2000) as David Kepesh, a cultural critic and college teacher who prides himself on his independence and ability to bed women without commitment. He left behind a wife and family long before, and for years has maintained a strictly sexual relationship with Carolyn (Clarkson), a 40-something woman who stops by in between business trips to have a few nights of uncomplicated physical workouts.

Kepesh’s life takes an unexpected turn when he meets Consuela Castillo (Cruz), one of his students. Having worked in a law firm for a while before going to college, she is a bit older than most of Kepesh’s students. Naturally, her beauty really puts the hook into him. He engages his patented charm and intelligence upon her, hoping to woo her into bed. It works, but something else kicks in. After years of being able to extricate himself from these sexual entanglements, he finds himself becoming possessive of Consuela and obsessed with the belief she will dump him for a younger man – the confident, youthful person that Kepesh used to be. Suddenly, this sophisticated guy is following her around, thinking up all these scenarios in which she is seeing other men.

In addition, Kepesh must deal with his grown son, Kenneth (Sarsgaard), who still is embittered about Kepesh abandoning his family. Kepesh insists that the marriage was a mistake and getting out of it was best for all in the long run.

Cruz is remarkable as Consuela, and if she does not end up with an Academy Award for this performance, or for her work in Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” I will be very surprised. While Consuela enchants Kepesh, she is grounded enough to step back and view their relationship accurately. She pretty much renders Kepesh mute when she challenges him on just where he thinks he is going with her.

Hopper as O’Hearn, Kepesh’s only friend, does his best work since his Oscar-nominated role in “Hoosiers.” While Kepesh claims to be the realist, O’Hearn is the one with the more practical view of things. In a way, O’Hearn’s sage advice to Kepesh helps him come to terms with his own listless marriage to Amy (Deborah Harry).

It is sad when Kepesh almost in desperation tries to deepen his relationship with Carolyn, who dismisses his effort with “why start now?”

The tragedy of Elegy is that Kepesh realizes in his later years that he has built a existence around himself that is nothing more than a wall that prevents him from pursuing a more meaningful life. Consuela ends up as the teacher here, by doing nothing more than being a beautiful and smart woman who loves him despite his age and his flaws.

Elegy is directed beautifully by Isabel Coixet, a native of Spain. Meyer’s script does get a bit confusing with a murky timeline, but the overall effect is a superbly acted and touching film. All the main characters enjoy at least one showcased scene revealing their very human frailties and strengths.

Source: Pasadena Star-News

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).

The situation is particularly complicated because Bardem is her co-star in Woody Allen’s latest movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, a romantic comedy that presents them as Jose and Maria Elena, artists and lovers who have a tempestuous relationship. Not until an American artist-wannabe (Scarlett Johansson) arrives and they embark upon a menage a trois do things calm down.

Would Cruz be willing to share a man?

“When I’m preparing a character, I don’t ask myself, ‘What I would do in this situation?’ ” she says evasively. “I don’t feel I have to be like them. I just need to understand them.”

What can she say about her kissing scene with Johansson?

“I’ve been asking Woody to give me some interesting lines,” she jokes. “I don’t have any funny stories, just that the set was more crowded than ever that day!”

Cruz flourished under Allen’s direction, she reports.

“It’s very interesting to see how, in most of Woody’s movies, comedy can come from real pain,” she says. “That’s always the irony of life. When I read the script I laughed, but when I was preparing the character and shooting I completely forgot about everything that could be funny. I felt I was doing a drama.

“Woody was very clever in making sure that none of us were aware of the moments that could be funny,” she adds. “Maria Elena suffers so much. I was very surprised when I saw the movie with an audience, and saw how much people laughed. All the characters are struggling and trying to resolve deep problems and big questions, and it’s very funny.”

Until recently Cruz’s most critically praised performances have been in European films such as Live Flesh (1997), Open Your Eyes (1997), All About My Mother (1999), Don’t Move (2004) and Volver (2006), for the last of which she was nominated for an Oscar as best actress. Initially such English-language films as The Hi-Lo Country (1998), All the Pretty Horses (2000), Blow (2001), Vanilla Sky (2001) and Sahara (2005) used her beauty more than her acting abilities, but she credits her increasing command of English for her ability to play more complex English-speaking characters in recent films.

“Now, after working and living for part of the time in America for a few years, I feel more free and relaxed,” she says. “You need the language to survive. That’s how you learn.”

In her film Elegy, playing in theaters in larger cities, Cruz plays a student who falls in love with her college professor (Ben Kingsley). The film is based on Philip Roth’s novel The Dying Animal (2007), and investigates the power of love and the effect that beauty can have on a relationship.

“I love the complexity of the characters,” Cruz says. “My character ignores (her beauty) out of respect for herself. She’s not allowing it to be an issue. He’s so afraid of falling in love with her because, in many ways, she’s more the adult. She has her own fears, but he has many fears that stop him from being brave enough to try to be happy.”

Until this year Cruz has had to content herself with less challenging work in American movies.

“I don’t want to complain about the ones I did earlier,” she says, “because I had a lot of opportunities to work with wonderful people. But the characters I’m being offered now in English demand more of me emotionally and at different levels.

“I couldn’t have played Maria Elena five years ago,” the actress explains, “because I had much less control of English. Many times Woody asked us to improvise and go back and forth in English and Spanish.”

Although Maria Elena is on screen for less than half the movie, she is hard to ignore.

“I was fascinated by Maria Elena,” Cruz says. “I don’t think I would want to be her in real life, but she was very attractive to play. A lot of it had to do with understanding her mind and the pain that she’s in 24 hours a day. She lives in a dark space and is very tortured. Her head is her prison.

“She’s the most extreme character I’ve played in English,” the actress says. “Every time she comes into a scene, she brings chaos. She doesn’t do it on purpose – it’s the only way she can relate to another human being.

“I didn’t want to treat her like a crazy person. I wanted to create a reality and find all the justifications she uses to behave like that.”

Cruz has been creating alternate realities since she was a child growing up in Madrid. The eldest of three children of an auto mechanic and a hairdresser, she studied acting informally at her mother’s salon.

“I used to get quiet there to be able to observe the women,” she recalls. “I’d wait for them to relax as much as possible so I could see them in action, the way they were with my mother, all their different behaviors. Women are complex. It was a very good school for acting.”

Which was good, because her real school wasn’t going so well.

“I’m strong and opinionated,” Cruz says bluntly, “and those qualities brought me a lot of problems since I was a little girl in school, saying, ‘I don’t agree,’ and fighting with the children.

“It’s OK,” she continues, “because it’s part of my curiosity for life. I don’t want it to change because of fear of what people think. I’m a Taurus, so I have the combination of temper and stubbornness. I think it’s helped me a lot in my career to be stubborn.

“I developed discipline as a child by studying ballet,” she adds. “I worked hard for what I wanted. I never expected things to come by themselves.”

Cruz made her film debut at 17 in Jamon, Jamon (1992) and has worked steadily since, gaining international acclaim with her three Almodóvar films, Live Flesh, All About My Mother and Volver. Broken Embraces, their fourth collaboration, is every bit a match for its predecessors, she says.

“What Pedro wrote is beyond beautiful,” Cruz says. “I play three characters in one. She’s an actress, so in the movie we have the character she plays, and then she also leads two different lives in her private life.”

Also upcoming for Cruz is her first venture into animation, as she voices a guinea pig named Juarez in Disney’s G-Force, due out next year.

“She has a very big temper,” Cruz says. “She’s also very funny. I don’t think she looks like me, but she has some of my expressions.”

In the fall Cruz will begin rehearsals for Nine, a film musical based on the 1980s Broadway hit that was itself adapted from Federico Fellini’s movie “8½” (1963). She will play Carla, the mistress of the Fellini-esque film director (Daniel Day-Lewis) who is the film’s protagonist.

“I studied dance for 17 years,” Cruz says, “and I’m really looking forward to dancing and singing. ’8½’ is one of my favorite movies. I watch it once or twice a year. It’s perfection from beginning to end.”

Which leaves only one question to answer: What can she say about Javier Bardem?

There is a long silence, before Cruz finally speaks.

“He’s an amazing, talented actor,” she says carefully.

For any further insights, you’ll have to see Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Source: Reading Eagle

From Roger Ebert
And then — the movie takes a dramatic turn, which I will not reveal, even though it contains all the deepest emotions and real feelings of the story. And in these scenes, Cruz is quietly powerful and very true. You understand why the Spanish director, Isabel Coixet, chose Cruz instead of, say, a 19-year-old. An actress needs depth and the experience of life to play these scenes, and Cruz has them.

Spanish actress Penelope Cruz will receive a Gotham Award Tribute at the nonprofit Independent Feature Project’s 18th annual Gotham Awards.

Cruz will appear December 2 at Manhattan’s Cipriani Wall Street to accept the career achievement honor. She currently stars in two English-language productions: Isabel Coixet’s Elegy and Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Additional honorees at the IFP event will be announced shortly, and a full list of Gotham Award nominees will be unveiled October 20.

Source: Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

“All I can say about that is he’s one of the most amazing actors of our century,” Cruz says.

Bardem returns the compliment. “She’s just a beautiful actress,” he says. “I remember when we were much younger and met on the set of Jamon Jamon.”

If you’re expecting some tales of young lust, think again. Bardem says, “Thank God we did that movie. I was 22 and it was my first big role and it was her first role. We were young people who wanted to eat it all up.”

Cruz isn’t eating anything up this particular morning, but she’s drinking a 16-ounce glass of carrot juice. Her career is hot with two big summer films: Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (now in theaters) and the Philip Roth adaptation Elegy (opening Friday). She’s currently in training to sing and dance in director Rob Marshall’s musical Nine.

And then there are those tabloid rumors about her engagement to Bardem, who she has reportedly been dating since meeting him on the set of the Allen movie.

“Is this the best time in my life? I have a real passion,” she begins. And just when the journalist seems very interested, Cruz adds, “I have a real passion for acting. I’ve had that passion since I was a little girl.

“I always say I try to remember every day how privileged I am to have a job I like so much. When I got my first movie at age 16, I thought it was my first and last.

“I’m able to get up in the morning and do a job I love, and I’m able to live from it. I never forget that feeling. I never want to forget that feeling. Now after 35 movies, it’s very important for me to keep remembering that.”

In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Cruz plays gun-wielding artist Maria Elena, who can’t give up the ex-husband (Bardem) she stabbed in a moment of passion.

Packing heat

The woman-on-the-edge character isn’t for the faint of heart, Cruz says. At one point, she decides to shoot her ex and his latest arm candy.

“I was worried about the gun scene for the whole shoot,” Cruz admits. “With Woody there are no rehearsals. So I thought, ‘How am I going to come into a shot with a gun?’ It felt like one of the most difficult things I would ever have to do.

“But Woody wanted me to be this pathetic girl with a gun,” she adds. “So the day we shot that gun scene I was completely lost. Woody is so clever. I think he managed to make all of us forget that we were also doing a comedy.

“I was so blown away at a screening to hear that people were laughing,” Cruz says. “I thought I was doing the most serious and painful drama ever. My character lives in a very dark space.”

When Cruz comes on screen it’s after a suicide attempt. “I didn’t want to play her like a crazy person,” she says. “I wanted to create this reality she lives in. I didn’t just want to play someone who is mentally disturbed.

“I’ve met a few people who are that unstable,” she says. “She suffers and her pain is real.”

Cruz, 34, says that it was her agent who approached Allen for the role after he heard the legendary director would be filming a movie in Barcelona. “I met Woody in New York in a very short meeting — less than one minute,” she says. “But when I left, people told me, ‘You’ve been there for such a long time.’ Woody told me, ‘I saw you in Volver and I’m writing a story that’s not finished. I think you would be right for the part.’ He didn’t tell me anything more about the story or the character.”

Allen says, “I wrote the script specifically for Penelope, Javier and Scarlett [Johansson]. It was so funny to me that Penelope and Javier spent hours in makeup every day talking about these characters. They’re such brilliant actors that they didn’t need to do that at all. They could just come out on set and do the role.”

The three characters decide to live together and have a three-way relationship. “I guess there are all kinds of things going on out there,” demurs Cruz when asked about this setup. “There are all kinds of people. For these three, this makes sense. She loves her ex-husband and he has a girlfriend. She can’t get along with her ex when they’re alone and she thinks Scarlett is the missing ingredient.

“It’s the most natural thing in the world to her to be in this three-way relationship, and I didn’t want to judge.”

Dance training pays off

In Elegy, Cruz plays a doomed student having an affair with a much older professor (Ben Kingsley).

“I was obsessed with that book and have been attached to the project for five years,” Cruz says. “I think it’s a very honest movie. In the film, she’s much younger but becomes the true adult. She’s in this relationship with this older man and he’s much more frightened than her.”

She soon will soon start rehearsals to sing and dance in the movie musical Nine, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Nicole Kidman.

“I’m very, very excited. I trained for 17 years and I am a dancer,” says the Madrid native. “As for the singing, well, I did audition and I was cast. Now I’m taking lessons. I’m very excited about the singing.”

Cruz says she would like to try a few more comedies.

“It’s not like I like to suffer in character,” Cruz says. “Some characters like this put you in a space that’s exhausting emotionally. I don’t like doing that on purpose.

“I don’t think you’re only a good actress if you’re suffering,” she says. “I like the characters that put you in a quiet and peaceful space. But this one was not like that. I was very exhausted when I was her.”

So to relax, she would …

“I don’t like getting in to my private life in interviews,” she says with a laugh and then sips her carrot juice.

Source: SunTimes.com

While Woody keeps the heavy-breathing scenes to a minimum, Cruz does lock lips with Scarlett Johansson, and there doesn’t seem to be much doubt that she’s doing the same in real-life with co-star Bardem. But Penelope isn’t confirming that he’s the latest of her off-screen leading men.

Q: Do you laugh a lot when Woody is directing you to be funny?

A: Actually, he made all of us forget that we were doing a comedy. Everyone was taking things very seriously, and my character suffers a lot. I felt like I was doing the most serious drama until I saw the movie with an audience in Cannes. I was like, ‘What are they laughing about?’ And then I went, ‘Of course, Woody is such a genius.’

Q: Woody let you do some improvising in Spanish. Did he know what you were saying?

A: He had an idea. What he didn’t realize was that I was swearing a lot. I didn’t know if he was going to be too happy when he found out the bad words that I said. But some of them stayed in the film even after he heard the translation.

Q: Was kissing Scarlett Johansson a memorable moment?

A: I think Scarlett has been funnier about it. She said something like it was nice to kiss someone who didn’t have beard. But we don’t have a lot of funny stories to tell about it. The set was very crowded that day and I’m not sure everyone had a reason to be there

Q: Your love scenes with Ben Kingsley in Elegy are pretty explicit.

A: What helped was that Isabel Coixet, the director, operates the camera. So she totally cleared the set except for the sound man. There was nobody else in the room. And while Ben and I were doing the scenes, we could hear her breathing, which somehow was very comforting.

Q: You look amazing in both films. What’s the secret?

A: I don’t have any. I don’t think I am beautiful. I can look good and I can look ugly. What’s funny is that when I was younger I wanted everyone to look at me. Now I like to watch other people because you can learn a lot of interesting things.

Q: Next you’re going to be singing and dancing in the film version of Nine. That takes you back to your childhood, doesn’t it?

A: Yes, when I was a kid I trained as a dancer for 14 years. I used to dance every day for hours and it gave me a lot of happiness. But the discipline of it was too demanding and I had what I guess you call a nervous breakdown. That’s when I decided to try acting. Now I’ve been taking dancing lessons again and working on my singing.

Q: Would you like to set the record straight on whether you’re in love with Javier Bardem?

A: He’s an amazing and wonderful actor, but I never talk about my personal life. I feel that it’s my right to save that for myself and it’s my responsibility to do it. It’s always a trap to share your secrets. I did that when I first got attention as a teenager acting in Spain. I would get so upset because I would talk about a movie for two hours and then all I read about was something personal that I talked about.

Q: Have you given any thought to settling and have a family?

A: I’ve loved playing a mother on the screen. I want to have babies myself. I don’t feel it’s the moment now, but for sure I want to be a mother. I have a tendency to become a mother of everyone around me. My family, my brother, my sister, they’re always complaining that I’m too protective and I’ve always been like that. But I don’t know if I believe in marriage. I believe in family, in love, in children.

Source: Parade.com

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