Since returning to Spain the star has won an Oscar and found true love. Now she talks about her raunchy new role in Nine.
Penelope Cruz is beating herself up, as is her wont. She’s annoyed that she can’t recall everything that happened on the night that should be the most memorable of her life: February 22, 2009 — when she won an Oscar for best supporting actress. “I feel frustrated that I can’t remember, because it was beautiful how your family and your people can feel so happy for you,” she says, in her perfumed English. “I felt I was on the border of passing out from tension. That I can remember very well.” She does remember crying for half an hour to release the tension, eating “300 canapés” in the green room, walking along the so-called “winners’ hallway” backstage. Above all, she remembers thinking, “What am I doing here? How did this happen?”

Well, that is a most unlikely story. How did a girl from a working-class suburb on the outskirts of Madrid, whose parents were a car mechanic and a hairdresser, come to be standing that night on that stage in Hollywood, one of the most acclaimed actresses in the world? As the breathless Cruz told the audience: “I grew up in a place called Alcobendas, where this was not a very realistic dream.”

Cruz had won playing Maria Elena, a volatile, obsessed, unhinged, artistic ex-wife in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, directed by Woody Allen. It wasn’t only her first Oscar, it was the first Oscar ever won by a Spanish actress. And only the second ever won by a Spaniard. Javier Bardem had won best supporting actor the pre­vious year for No Country for Old Men.

That synchronicity seems extraordinary. Bardem had been Cruz’s co-star in her first film, the raunchy, exuberant Jamon, Jamon, in 1992, made when she was just 17 and Spain was still revelling in its freedom from dictatorship. And, during the making of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Spain’s most famous and most beautiful actors finally, perhaps inevitably, became lovers. They are rumoured to be engaged, although I am admonished before meeting Cruz that I am not to ask her about such things, or, indeed, any “personal” questions.

So, here we are, she and I. It’s shortly after noon on a recent Saturday. We’re in the cavernous stone reception lobby of the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Bou­levard. Cruz is sitting in the very far corner, as far as one can get from the entrance, where people might recognise her. She’s perched on the end of a large couch, her legs tucked beneath her, dashing off a couple of emails on her BlackBerry. She used to be addicted, she tells me. “I was using it nonstop, on ­holiday, everywhere.” But now, as part of her strategy to seek balance in her life, to cut back on the work, to be less controlling, to worry less, to be less self-critical, she says she has weaned herself off it. Somewhat.

She is dressed informally in a dark silk bomber jacket, jeans that are turned up, a striped blue and white cotton top, and a scarf that she keeps wrapped round her neck the whole time, as if for protection, or at least to indicate that she intends to be here briefly. The only live flesh that’s visible is her delicate hands, with which she gestures frequently, and her L’Oréal-enriched, butterscotch face, with its wide, expressive mouth, long nose and surprisingly opaque brown eyes. She has a ring on her engagement finger, but it’s not, as far as I can tell, an engagement ring, if you are looking for clues of any kind. And I’m not. Promise.

This Penelope Cruz is all business, very matter-of-fact. She has zero interest in trying to charm. She’s completely professional — she answers all my questions clearly and honestly — but doesn’t for a moment pretend this isn’t work. She smiles occasionally, but more for emphasis than pleasure, and barely laughs.

“Somebody once said that they pay you to promote the movies, not to make them,” she says, sweeping back her thick dark hair. “I agree with that. I’m not going to say more things to this journalist because I want people to like me. You can never think you can please everybody. You have to have your integrity, no? It’s always been the natural thing for me not to talk about my private life. It’s just a way to protect myself.”

Of course, like an idiot, I now realise that the person I had been hoping to meet is an artfully contrived illusion, the Penelope Cruz of the cinema; the Penelope Cruz who has helped Pedro Almodovar carve her into celluloid in four wonderful films from his powerful and perverse imagination: carnal, earthy, capable of astonishingly broad and deep expressions of emotion. Or Woody Allen’s: effortlessly beautiful, fiery and impulsive.

Or the Penelope Cruz who dazzles again in Nine, her latest film, the musical extravaganza that is already shaping up to be one of the year’s big Oscar conten­ders. Cruz plays Carla, the desperately needy mistress of an Italian film director, Guido Contini, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. “She is completely addicted to the relationship with Guido,” she explains. “I wanted to explore that obsession.” Cruz’s fabulous song-and- dance number, A Call from the Vatican, in which Carla tells Guido everything she wants him to do to her, is one of the highlights of the film and is already making the rounds on YouTube. Cruz performs with heart-thumping sensuality in a satin basque and stockings.

Nine is the movie version of the enormously successful Broadway musical of the same name that opened in 1982. Originally starring the late Raul Julia, it ran for 729 performances. The piece was revived at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 1996, a production that transferred to Broadway in 2003, this time with Antonio Banderas as Guido. Both this stage show and the new movie from which it is taken are based on Federico Fellini’s great autobiographical film 8½, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale, often seen as the greatest cinematic rendering of the perils, seductions and joys of the creative process.

In the new film version, Guido/Fellini is just about to make what he hopes will be his greatest film, but he is suffering from a crippling creative block and an existential midlife crisis. At the same time, he is perilously juggling the beautiful women in his life: Luisa, his wife (played by Marion Cotillard); his mistress, Carla (Cruz); Claudia, the putative star of his movie (Nicole Kidman); Stephanie, a journalist (Kate Hudson); and, because Guido is an Italian, Mamma, his mother, played by Sophia Loren. Nine was co-written by Anthony Minghella, the British director who died last year —almost certainly his last work for the cinema.

In charge of this stellar line-up was master of musicals Rob Marshall, who directed the Oscar-laden Chicago — another successful Broadway piece that transferred to the screen — and the dancing and singing were obviously challenging. Cruz and the other actresses trained for two months at Shep­perton Studios, just outside London, before shooting began, and for another month while it was filming. Although Cruz had studied ballet in Madrid until her midteens, she says that didn’t prepare her for what she had to do in Nine: swinging on ropes and sliding down a sheath of satin sheets.

“It was like starting again all over,” she says. “When I saw the choreography the first day, I thought it was almost impossible to be able to get to dance and sing like that, and do the whole number at once without stopping. It was three months of rehearsing for that number, every day a little more, a little more. The day that you get to run the number without stopping, you feel like you are flying — such a beautiful feeling.”

Cruz was also nervous about having to sing for the first time on screen. “I am a very big fan of music, so I listen to everything, and I sing at home in my karaoke machine, and in the shower, but it was the first time professionally. But I loved it.” She says she was incredibly excited when she finally saw the film. “I spent the whole movie clapping and screaming. I felt like a three-year-old at Disneyland.”

Does she like watching herself on screen? “I don’t want to like myself too much in my work, because if the camera sees that, it’s the thing it will hate the most, seeing an actor that likes himself too much.”

She says she has always been very self-critical. “It’s one of those things I don’t feel I should try to change. I think you need that to keep growing and improving.”

With the Oscar safely back at her house in Madrid, where she lives on a private estate — close to the rest of her family, including her younger sister, Monica, now a successful television actress, and her younger brother, Eduardo, a singer — Cruz may now be considered a modern cinematic icon. But for a number of years in the early part of this decade, it looked as if the beautiful Spanish actress had lost her way. Having quickly become a big star in Spain, she started working in America when she was only 23. She saw it as the ultimate challenge, particularly for someone who then spoke “only three words of English”.

Almost all her American films, however — including All the Pretty Horses, which starred Matt Damon; Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, with Nicolas Cage; Blow, starring Johnny Depp; Vanilla Sky, with Tom Cruise; and Sahara, co-starring Matthew McConaughey — were commercial and critical disappointments. Despite the big budgets and the big-name co-stars, Cruz seemed adrift. She became better known as the lover of some of her co-stars, particularly Cruise — whom she started dating shortly after he split from Nicole Kidman — and McConaughey. Almodovar has since said he was very distressed at what was happening to his muse in America. “Tom is a very contro­versial person,” the director complained, “and the fact that she was his girlfriend, far from being an advantage for her, was a huge disadvantage. I worried how she would live through all the negativity.” Like a jealous lover, Almodovar was most anxious that Cruz would forget what had first inspired her to be an actor and might even lose what she had once been capable of being for him.

Although nobody in her family was involved in the arts, Cruz says she first became fascinated by acting when, as a young girl, she watched the women in her mother’s small beauty salon in Alcobendas. “Those women who were always preten­ding to be somebody else,” she recalls, “they walked in one way, and their physical appearance was changing into something more like who they wanted to be. I was fascinated by how that affected the way they behaved. I was always sitting there watching them, thinking, ‘Why are we all acting all the time in life?’”

Today, Cruz insists it was watching Almodovar’s films, especially Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, on her family’s Betamax video player that really made her want to be an actor. “Because of what those movies were making me feel, and the way he was able to express all those emotions, I was fascinated by his world, by Pedro’s universe.” She still is.

She was too young for any of the parts in Kika, the first Almodovar film she went up for, but he promised to find something for her in the future. He did, four years later, in his 1997 thriller Live Flesh, with an astonishing eight-minute sequence at the beginning of the film in which she plays a poor prostitute giving birth on a bus.

Cruz and Almodovar have since made three more films together, one of the most fruitful and fascinating collaborations in cinematic history: All About My Mother, in which she played a nun who finds out she is HIV-positive after she has an affair with a transvestite; Volver, in which she is a plucky widow; and their most recent, Broken Embraces, in which Cruz plays a woman (the mistress of a much older, very controlling and wealthy man) who wants to be an actress — with tragic consequences.

“I felt very sad when I was making the movie,” Cruz says. “It doesn’t seem pos­sible that a character is going to affect me on an almost unconscious level, but it does. This was the most difficult film I have done with Pedro, because the way she expresses her feelings is so different from the way I express mine.”

After the pitfalls of her American sojourn, it was Cruz’s return to Almodovar, to her roots in Spain and in Spanish cinema, that proved to be the dramatic turning point in her career, and her life. With Volver, she won her first Academy Award nomination, and her performance wowed Woody Allen enough to offer her the part in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. That won her the Oscar and reunited her with Bardem, the man she may come to marry.

It has also changed the focus of her life. Acknowledging that she has always been a “workaholic”, Cruz has cut back on her commitments since making Nine and Broken Embraces, and has nothing on the horizon. She is now, at 35, trying simply to enjoy life, her success, her relationship with the man who may be the love of her life. But that doesn’t come easily to her.

“It is in my nature to worry, about anything. I have always been like that, but now I try to control it and to be more positive. But I worry a lot.”

With that, she says goodbye, and starts tapping into her BlackBerry.

source: entertainment.timesonline.co.uk