The Dream Life of Penélope Cruz
There are oddities that make sense only in Los Angeles—canary-yellow Rolls-Royces, lasagna cupcakes, agents. The Hollywood Walk of Fame is another. Here is a boulevard where Meryl Streep shares the glory with Erik Estrada; where Audrey Hepburn earns the same real estate as Rin Tin Tin; where a Spider-Man impersonator once socked a Charlie Chaplin impersonator in the face. The Walk is America’s most accessible shrine to show-business fantasy: If you dream big enough, one day your name could be commemorated on this hallowed ground in gold letters. And then a sunburned dude with a green parrot on his shoulder will roller-skate right over it.
It’s a warm Friday in April when the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce awards its 2,436th star to Penélope Cruz. She is a woman who, growing up in Spain, saw a photo of a bedazzled Michael Jackson kneeling before his red-carpeted star and never imagined she would one day do the same. “It sounded like science fiction,” she says, her famous inflection deliciously animating the term. When Cruz first moved to Los Angeles, she spoke little English and lived in a tiny hotel room she shared only with cats. Cats, plural. “I was very lonely,” she says. “I would find cats in the street and take them with me. I raised a lot of cats in that period.”
The cats all found nice homes, Cruz assures me in a way that recalls those end-of-film disclaimers (no animals were harmed during the making of Penélope Cruz). In the years since, Cruz, too, has found a more comfortable place in America, evolving from a misused ornament in Hollywood movies to one of the most celebrated actresses of her generation, a multilingual Oscar winner and muse to giants like Pedro Almodóvar and Woody Allen. Today her home—whether in Los Angeles, New York, or Madrid—is shared with her new husband, the acclaimed Spanish actor, fellow Oscar winner, and occasional on-screen lover Javier Bardem. A couple of months ago, there was a tender new addition: a son, Leonardo, the couple’s first child.
It has been a staggering journey. “I don’t think people realize the barriers Penélope’s broken,” says Rob Marshall, who directed Cruz in 2009’s Nine as well as the brand-new Pirates of the Caribbean installment, On Stranger Tides, in which she joins the misadventures of Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow. “There is really no one like her.”
This is why we’re here, why Cruz is getting a star amid an eight-deep crowd of fans in front of the El Capitan theater, waving old magazine covers. Cruz steps out into the sun. Sheathed in a violet L’Wren Scott dress and wearing tall black Louboutins, she is, as always, a burst of smoky-eyed beauty. Her brown hair plunges over her shoulders in the way hair does only for cartoon mermaids. The crowd erupts. Bardem slips by in sunglasses and a navy blazer, barely noticed.
After some laudatory words from Marshall, it’s time for Captain Sparrow, Johnny Depp. He looks so eccentrically Depp, it’s as if he’s fresh from posing at Madame Tussaud’s: tattered brown fedora, violet aviator glasses, scarf, flannel shirt, and baggy carpenter’s jeans with two black pens tucked into the pocket of the right leg. “A relatively long time ago, we did Blow together,” Depp cracks, letting the double entendre linger. It’s a reference to his first movie with Cruz, released a decade ago, about the cocaine kingpin George Jung. The two actors have stayed close friends. Cruz refers to Depp as “The Man with the Hat.” Depp calls her “this curious Spanish creature.”
“A lot of things can be said about this creature Penélope Cruz,” Depp says. “None of them are bad.” He calls her a “one-off,” “magnificent,” and “magical.”
“She’s the dysfunctional Bacall to my twisted Bogart,” Depp continues. “She’s the otherworldly Scarlett to my clueless Rhett. She’s the. . . .” He pauses. “Well, she’s Ricky to my Lucy.”
A double-decker Hollywood tour bus rattles by. When the passengers on the upper deck see Cruz and Depp standing just inches away, jaws drop. They look like ticketholders on a Loch Ness boat tour who have just seen Nessie flip out of the water.
OmigodPenélopeeeeeee!!
Johnnyyyyy!!!!
A proclamation is read declaring Penélope Cruz Day in Hollywood. Cruz is the first Spanish-born actress to be nominated for an Academy Award, the first to win, now the first one with a star on the Walk of Fame. “I came to Los Angeles for the first time in 1994,” Cruz begins. “I only knew how to say two things. One was ‘How are you?’ The other was ‘I want to work with Johnny Depp.’ ” The crowd laughs. She has come a long way on this boulevard of dreams—the Lady with the Cats, now waving a sword at the Man with the Hat.
Penélope Cruz adores karaoke. She adores it the way a first-grader adores a golden-retriever puppy—in an unself-conscious, non-ironic way. She will sing “Hollaback Girl,” by Gwen Stefani, and, if she is so compelled, “Without Me,” by Eminem. (Opening lyrics: “Two trailer-park girls go round the outside/Round the outside/Round the outside.”) Karaoke is a non-negotiable part of the Penélope Cruz experience. “I’ve gone to karaoke bars in almost every city I have been to,” she says. “Every time I am on a movie location, we find a karaoke bar and take the crew.”
Not long ago, there was a rowdy karaoke night that included Bardem and the couple’s close friend the Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Pau Gasol, who is from Barcelona. Cruz and Gasol performed “Without Me” as a duet. Gasol is seven feet tall. Cruz is not.
“I was this big next to him,” Cruz says, squishing an index finger to a thumb. It is a few days before the Walk of Fame event, and I am meeting Cruz at an outdoor restaurant at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. “My husband took a picture of us while we were singing. It’s very interesting, that picture.”
It is an amusing mental image, the elegant Academy Award winner and the NBA giant, howling away to R-rated hip-hop. There is a transformation that can happen when actors win Oscars: Dipped in gold and put up on the mantel alongside the little gold statue, they are denied the human, quirky qualities that made them so appealing in the first place. The public sees Oscar winners as a little rarefied, a little fancy, even if they’re not. (Of course, some Oscar winners see themselves this way.)
But Cruz does not put on airs. She is an Oscar winner who can obsess over the films of the mid–twentieth century Italian actress Anna Magnani (The Rose Tattoo) but also appreciates Lady Gaga (“She’s invented something that feels very fresh”). She’s an Oscar winner who has befriended Bono but also enjoys the high camp of Glee (especially when Bardem filmed a guest spot on the TV musical). She’s an Oscar winner who confesses to a history of roller-skating and the fact that she doesn’t drive a car, even in L.A.
“I only drive in movies,” she says, laughing. “I know that’s very weird to hear for an American. I have a weird relationship with it. I know how to drive, but I never went to take the test.”
There’s a self-deprecating humility to Cruz. “The best thing about Penélope’s sense of humor is that it’s primarily about herself,” says Cruz’s close friend the actress Salma Hayek.
Even now, Cruz doesn’t feel far removed from her modest roots in Spain, where she grew up the older daughter of a hardware-store owner and a mother who ran a beauty salon. Originally trained in dance, she remembers wearing out the family Betamax with Billy Wilder classics like Love in the Afternoon and The Apartment, and knowing she wanted to be an actress. Cruz is still the belligerent teenager who barged into an agent’s office, begged to be represented, and, when the agent said she was too young, kept coming back. She’s still the dreamer who aspired to work with her cinematic idol Almodóvar—she lied about her age to buy a ticket to Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!—only to wind up starring in four of his films, a director-actress relationship that’s so tight it’s almost telepathic.
Cruz can recall her first conversation with Almodóvar as if it were yesterday. He called her at home after seeing a precocious Cruz break out in films like Jamón, Jamón and Belle Epoque. She was shocked to hear his voice. “He said, ‘I am going to write you a character that fits you like a glove,’ ” she recalls. “Then he did, for Live Flesh. I played a whore giving birth in a bus.”
It was the beginning of a fertile partnership. From Spain, Almodóvar calls the eight-minute opening scene his “favorite part” of Live Flesh, and points out that the woman who helped Cruz’s character give birth on the bus was played by Pilar Bardem—Javier’s mother.
“I always saw Penelope as a mother,” Almodóvar says. “Two years later she did it for me again in All About My Mother. And in Volver, she played the mother of all mothers.”
Cruz and Almodóvar speak all the time, even when they’re not collaborating. Cruz says she asked him the other day for help in writing her Walk of Fame speech. (Almodóvar’s unused suggestion: “If people are going to walk over you, better to be walked over on the Walk of Fame.”)
In Cruz, Almodóvar and other directors have found a glamorous actress with rare range, one who can charm us in one scene, rip our guts out in the next, and knock us over laughing moments later. How strange it is to think that not long ago, Penélope Cruz’s status as an American movie star was an unresolved question. Her popularity abounded in Europe, but there were high-profile misfires here alongside a series of strapping leading men: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, with Nicolas Cage; Vanilla Sky, with Tom Cruise; Sahara, with Matthew McConaughey. All of that seems like 1,000 years ago. Cruz is now a three-time Oscar nominee, recognized in consecutive years for her work in Volver, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and Nine.
She won, of course, in 2009, for Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina, in which she played Maria Elena, the volatile Spanish artist and ex-girlfriend to Bardem’s rakish painter, Juan Antonio. Audiences may have entered the movie tempted by the promise of on-screen assignations (including a much-hyped kiss between Cruz and Scarlett Johansson), but they left remembering Cruz’s wicked, temperamental performance, which flashed from Spanish to English, from affection to fury.
“She has a wild kind of animal quality that was perfect for the unstable character I had written,” Allen says. “A lot of actresses would not have been able to go that deeply.”
Cruz took her mother, Encarna, to the Oscars the night she won for Vicky Cristina. “I grew up in a place called Alcobendas, where this was not a very realistic dream,” she said from the stage as her mom got misty.
When it was over, she headed over to In-N-Out Burger, still wrapped in her vintage white Balmain gown. “You have to remove the tight dress to eat a Double Double monster cheeseburger with everything on it,” she says.The post-Oscar In-N-Out burger has become a ritual. It’s happened after each of her nominations—the hungry Spanish bombshell at the drive-through. But this February, after Cruz accompanied Bardem to the Kodak Theatre in support of his Best Actor nomination for Biutiful, there was no burger run.
“We had something more important to do,” Cruz says, smiling. “We had to go home to the baby.”
Yes: the baby. “Beautiful Leonardo,” as Marshall called him at the Walk of Fame presentation. Cruz discovered she was pregnant shortly before filming began for On Stranger Tides. She remains grateful for the way she felt protected by Marshall, Depp, and the rest of the cast and crew. “When she found out it was a boy, she kept it hush-hush, but we knew,” Marshall says. With all the high-flying action going on, the director says, Cruz “loved that there was a boy in her.”
“I was pregnant and a pirate,” Cruz says. “A beautiful experience.”
Leonardo’s birth, in January, was announced quietly a week after the fact. Mommy reports that her nights are not too hectic. “Some nights you sleep more, some nights less, but you don’t care,” she says.
I ask Cruz how has motherhood has changed her, and her face grows flushed. Tears begin to collect under her eyes.
“One second,” she says. She dips her head and dabs at her face. I fear I am about to be removed from the hotel, forever banned for making Penélope Cruz cry. But now she is laughing and crying at the same time. “This has never happened to me,” she says. “This is really funny. I’m sorry. It’s unexpected.”
To date, Cruz hasn’t talked at all about her son in public. But it’s clear his impact is profound. “From the first second, you feel so much love,” she says. “It is a revolutionary experience. That’s the best way I can describe it. It transforms you completely, in a second. Nature is very wise and gives you nine months to prepare, but in that moment—when you see that face, you are transformed forever.”
She is not trying to wipe away the tears now. She rolls with it. It’s an unabashed, blissful cryfest. “Even if you have heard from all your friends and family, ‘This is what’s going to happen,’ until it happens to you, it’s hard to understand in your soul,” Cruz says.
Almodóvar says he “never had the slightest doubt that she wouldn’t feel a complete woman until she gave birth.” For years Cruz has been passionate about children’s causes; when she was 22, she volunteered in Calcutta at one of Mother Teresa’s orphanages, meeting the woman herself. “It changed the way I see the world,” she says. She remains engaged in humanitarian ventures, like her friend Bono’s (Red) project benefiting Africa (“A genius idea”), and Sean Penn’s recovery effort in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. “It’s not just somebody who is talking about it,” she says of Penn. “He’s there.”
Motherhood has intensified Cruz’s determination to give back. “Even if you were aware of children and felt compassion, when you have your own, it multiplies,” she says. “It breaks your heart to know that there are so many children in the world suffering so much.”
A day later, Leonardo is present during a photo shoot, cooing gently with the nanny while Cruz poses a few feet away outside. Cruz is very careful about unlocking the door on her new family. Never one to disclose personal details—in the past, queries about boyfriends real and rumored were brushed away like houseflies—she is vigilant about her son. “I want my son—and my kids if I have more—to grow up in a way that is as anonymous as possible,” Cruz says. “The fact that his father and I have chosen to do the work that we do doesn’t give anybody the right to invade our privacy.”
From Spain, Almodóvar says he has connected with baby and “Mama Penélope” via Skype. Motherhood, the director says, is “going to be one of her great roles.”
Hayek agrees. “Penélope is a motherly creature, a warrior by nature,” she says. “I told her that little boy is the luckiest boy in the world.”
Back at our outdoor table, Cruz can’t help being a glowing advocate. “Do you have children?” she asks me.
Not yet.
She slaps me hard on the hand. “Good luck!” she says, beaming. “It really is the best thing in the world.”
On Stranger Tides will open on more than 3,500 screens around the planet. In terms of scale, it is the biggest movie of Cruz’s career, a 3-D megabudget departure from the intimacy of Almodóvar and Woody Allen. Marshall wasn’t sure Cruz would be interested when he proposed the part to her over dinner toward the end of filming Nine. Cruz leaped out of her chair. “I said, ‘Are you crazy? I would love to do that with you and Johnny,’ ” she recalls.
She plays Blackbeard’s daughter Angelica, a devious pirate who shares a complicated romantic history with Depp’s Captain Sparrow. The scenes between Cruz and Depp play like amusing tangos—pirate ex-lovers, bickering in matching eyeliner. “They do this dance for the whole movie,” Cruz says.
Much of On Stranger Tides was filmed in Hawaii, where Bardem joined Cruz on location. At one point, there was a break in filming that saw Cruz and Bardem quietly slip away to tie the knot. And because of Cruz’s delicate condition, her younger sister, Mónica, stepped in to take over some of her sword-fighting and stunt duties.
“I’m sure the movie was daunting because of the size and scope of it,” says Bruckheimer, who has helmed a franchise that has generated $2.6 billion in box office to date. “It was a more than 100–day schedule—a long haul for an actor, especially someone who is pregnant. But she never complained.”
Cruz says she is excited to start working again. There is a new film with Allen, set to begin filming this summer in Rome, its script draped in mystery, as all of the director’s projects are. “A man came to my house with a package, gave it to me, and said, ‘I will be back in half an hour,’ ” Cruz says. “I asked, ‘Would you mind giving me two?’ ”
But these days, Cruz is unsure how busy she wants to be. “Of course I will work, because we all need to work,” she says. “But it’s very important to have time with my family.”
After an exhilarating year of firsts, this is a happy problem for Penélope Cruz. “It is great to see somebody who you think deserves it get everything she has ever dreamed of,” says Hayek. “It’s magical. It gives you hope.” Even if Cruz’s next director might have to guide her back to Earth.
“It will feel strange the next time I hear ‘Action!’ ’’ she confesses. “I’m going to think I am on Mars.”
The Cruz/Bardem duo was spotted in the audience of the Oscar telecast a few times throughout the evening. They looked to be enjoying themselves although Javier Bardem lost the Best Actor award to Colin Firth and his film Biutiful which was up for Best Foreign Language film was defeated by Denmark’s In a Better World.
Here are some details regarding Cruz’s stunning return to the red carpet look!
One month after welcoming a baby boy, Penelope Cruz dazzled on the red carpet at Sunday’s Academy Awards.
Walking hand-in-hand with her Oscar-nominated husband Javier Bardem, Cruz, 36, showed off her enviable figure in a curve-hugging red L’Wren Scott design. The new mom accessorized her awards show ensemble with yellow oval and pear shaped chandelier earrings and a pink sapphire ring, both by Chopard.
It is Cruz’s first red carpet appearance since she gave birth to their first child last month in L.A., reportedly named Leo Encinas.
Although the Spanish superstar couple have remained fairly mum about their new family, Bardem couldn’t help but gush while accepting a Goya Award in his native Spain Feb. 13.
“I dedicate [this award] to my wife and son for awakening my heart and smile every day,” Bardem, 41, said.
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