"The first movies I did in English, I was struggling more with English. 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."
Captivating Cruz is a news a photoblog dedicated to Academy Award winning actress Penélope Cruz. Our mission is to keep you updated with the latest news and media regarding Miss Cruz.
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A scan from the 2010 Hollywood Portfolio issue has been added to the gallery.
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.
I previously reported Penélope Cruz would be featured in the upcoming Vanity Fair Hollywood Portfolio for 2010 which is the March issue, and now we have an adorable image and behind the scenes video from the mag. Last year she was photographed with Woody Allen and this year she’s with her idol Pedro Almodóvar.
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.
Penélope Cruz says winning an Oscar was like getting the best toy ever.
The Nine star scooped the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress last year for her performance in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and admits receiving the gold statue was one of the happiest moments in her life.
Penélope is proud to show off her prize at her home and once even took her Oscar to the beach.
She said: “My Oscar lives in my house, but it changes rooms all the time. I’m looking at it in different places to make the final decision. I even took it to the beach one day. It’s like being five when you finally get a toy you’ve been asking for.”
Since winning the prestigious prize, the 35-year-old actress insists she doesn’t feel any extra pressure when making her films, because she has always worked hard.
Penélope – who is believed to be engaged to Javier Bardem – added to Stylist magazine: “I’ve always felt under pressure and had a lot of insecurity, so that doesn’t change and I don’t want that to alter. I don’t want to get to the set and feel too secure. I’ve worked for so many years feeling a lot of respect and healthy fear of the work and I don’t feel I can change that now.”
CBS’s 60 Minutes has posted an amazing new piece of Penélope Cruz. In the rare interview, the Spanish starlet and Academy Award Winner, opens up about her life, career and childhood (also includes rare images of her as young girl!). Charlie Rose reports. While I do not like how the reporter goes about some parts of the interview, Pe remains poised and intelligent. It is truly a must see for her fans! Also worth noting – the video features some behind the scenes footage of Penélope and Pedro being shot for the Vanity Fair Hollywood Portfolio (usually the March issue)!
At 35, Spanish actress Penelope Cruz is one of the most sensual and photographed women in the world. She has won critical acclaim, not only in Europe, but now, also in Hollywood. Last year she took home the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress — the first Spanish actress ever to win an Academy Award.
How did this versatile performer from a working class suburb of Madrid become this generation’s Sophia Loren?
In part, it could be by turning in performances like the one she gives playing Carla, the seductive mistress, in the movie Nine – her first time singing and dancing in a film.
In an interview with Charlie Rose, Cruz said she trained for three months to do a number in the movie.
She told Rose, “I had so much fun.”
And Cruz’s enjoyment shows in her provocative performance.
I am sorry for not being her to update Penelope-Cruz.org during this amazing promotion time for Penelope (Nine) buts it due to my personal life at this moment. However I will hopefully be back in a few more weeks and can bring you all the latest.
To briefly keep up, check Wire Image for the latest pictures of events, and watch two of her latest interviews with David Letterman and Oprah Winfrey below!
Pedro Almodóvar made his regular New York Film Festival pit stop Wednesday, bringing his new film-industry love quadrangle Broken Embraces to town ahead of its closing-night presentation this weekend. His star and longtime muse Penélope Cruz joined him for a press conference following yesterday’s screening, but at this festival — perhaps the most abjectly cinephilic in the world — Almodóvar proved himself once again as the one person who can outshine the planet’s biggest international sexpot.
Film history has given us a myriad of directors who play favorites, who channel their visions through an actor, using them as their vessel: Think John Ford and John Wayne, Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. In the case of beloved Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, his inspiration is, beyond a shred of doubt, the lovely Penelope Cruz.
“Our relationship keeps changing and evolving,” says the actress. “It gets to the point where we often know what the other one is thinking. We really have a strong friendship, but it doesn’t mean I get less nervous when I’m around him on set because he’s so honest. And that’s what I love about working with him — his honesty.”
Va-va-voom! Penélope Cruz takes the cover of the November issue of Vanity Fair, and wowzas, she looks incredible in a ravishing new photoshoot.
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.
Spanish director Pedro Almodovar pays homage to filmmaking and his muse Penelope Cruz in Broken Embraces, a movie about a director who has a passionate affair with his leading lady
The picture, Almodovar’s fourth collaboration with Cruz, which is in competition at the Cannes film festival, recalls “films noirs,” classic comedies and screen sirens of the past.
It includes a scene from Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio In Italia starring Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders and the film-within-a-film revisits Almodovar’s 1988 hit Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown.
“I fully believe that cinema can make life more perfect,” the Oscar winner told reporters recently after Broken Embraces was warmly applauded at a press screening.
Sex and the City 2 (2010) 
Los abrazos rotos (2009) 
Nine (2009) 
G-Force (2009) 
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) 
Elegy (2008) 
