Penélope Cruz, a Spanish actress, writer, and producer. A true calling that continues to captivate and amuse anyone and everyone who meets or works with Cruz.
By MARIANA MEJIA
Penélope Cruz Sánchez was born on April 28, 1974 in Alcobendas, Madrid, Spain. She was named after the song “Penélope” by Joan Manuel Serrat. Her parents are Eduardo Cruz, a retailer, and Encarna Sánchez, a hair dresser. She has two younger siblings and a half-sister from her father’s second wife; a brother and singer Eduardo Cruz, a sister and actress Mónica Cruz, and a half-sister, Carmen Moreno. When Penélope was a toddler, she was already becoming a compulsive performer by re-enacting TV commercials for amusement, but decided to keep her focus on dancing.
While growing up, Penélope continued to dance classical ballet, fin
ished her second year of secondary school, and had four years of dance with instructor Cristina Rota. Moreover, she also took several dance courses in New York. Penélope went to New York to dance ballet and study English. Since she had already taken nine years of classical ballet at the Conservatorio Nacional and three years of Spanish ballet with Ángela Garrido, she also took a jazz dance course with Raúl Caballero to further expand her dancing techniques. After studying classical ballet for nine years at Spain’s National Conservatory, she continued her training under a series of prominent dancers.
Penélope said, “The discipline that ballet requires is obsessive. And
only the ones who dedicate their whole lives are able to make it. Your toenails fall off and you peel them away, and then you’re asked to dance again and keep smiling. I wanted to become a professional ballet dancer.” And so, she did!
However, at the age of 15, she found her true calling to become a performer, when she bested more than 300 other performers at a talent agency for an audition. The results landed her several roles in Spanish television shows and music videos, which in turn catapulted Penelope’s career on the big screen. Penelope was only 14 at the time of her first acting audition, when she read a scene from Casablanca (1942), which was almost nearly impossible for someone at that age to do. Penélope’s manager asked Penélope if she wanted to work with her and started to sending Penélope some castings. “When I was 16, I got Jamón, Jamón (1992). Of course, I had to lie about my age. And I had to lie to my parents about the content of the script.” In 1990, Bigas Luna (Director) was determined to have Penelope star as the lead role in the torrid, The Ages of Lulu, but Penélope was only 14. They (the directors) agreed that she was too young for the role and Francesca Neri was cast instead. Two years later, Luna’s fixation with Cruz resulted in her breakthrough performance in Jamón, Jamón (1992), her first film, which made her famous for her somewhat erotic scenes. Cruz claims her role in Bigas Luna’s Jamón, Jamón (1992) psychologically scarred her for life. She was only a teenager when she was cast in the film, which required her to do several nudity and sex scenes. But she eventually got over it collaborated again with Bigas in Volaverunt (1999).
In 1992, Cruz’s third film was the Oscar winning Belle Epoque, in which she played one of the four sisters vying for the love of a handsome army deserter. The film also garnered several Goya Awards (Spanish Academy Awards). Later on, her acting résumé grew exponentially three to four films per year, and soon Cruz was the leading lady of Spanish cinema. Then, in 1997, Live Flesh offered her to work with the well-known Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, who would later become her ticket to international fame. That same year, she had the leading role as actress in the thriller/drama/mystery/scifi 1997 film Open Your Eyes. Open Your Eyes in Spain and it became such a success that it earned eight Goya Awards. Unfortunately, Cruz didn’t get one that year. But her luck eventually flipped in 1998, when the comedy film The Girl of Your Dreams won and she received the Goya Award for Best Actress. Cruz made several more English-language films afterwards, but her first international hit was with Almodóvar’s 1999 film All About My Mother, in which she played an unchaste nun, which showered Cruz with several other awards and accolades; which Cruz found herself on both sides of the Atlantic. Cruz is the only person to win both, an Oscar for Best Actress and appear in two Oscar-winning films, All About My Mother and Belle Epoque, which won Best Foreign Language Films.
Cruz’s next big project was in the U.S., when she was in the 2000 film, Woman on Top, an American comedy about a chef with bewitching culinary skills who has a severe case of
motion sickness. Cruz said,
“I came to Los Angeles for the first time in 1994. I spoke no English. I only knew how to say two sentences: “How are you?” and “I want to work with Johnny Depp.”
Now she speaks three languages: Spanish, Italian, and English. Despite the misconception, she can’t speak French. Even so, she hires dialect coaches to help her in French films, like in the 2003 film Fanfan, in which she learned her lines phonetically. Most of the time, she does need the help of a translator when she is promoting a film on French television. So, from not knowing English at the time and later on, was able to work with Johnny Depp when she signed up for a contract in 2001 for the drug-trafficking drama Blow and worked alongside Mat Damon in the 2000 Billy Bob Thornton film, All the Pretty Horses. After the 2000 film All the Pretty Horses, Cruz became a vegetarian, because this western drama film gave her an insight into how cruel the fur industry is to several animals. Cruz says she’s wary of being typecast as a beautiful young damsel, but it’s hard to imagine disguising her wide-eyed charms and generous nature, which is where her nickname came into play, “The Spanish Enchantress.”
The Spanish Enchantress (Cruz), was in several other relationships before she met her husband, Javier Bardem (Spanish performer). Her past relationships were with Matt Damon, from June-December 2000, Tom Cruise, for a year until January 2004 and with Matthew McConaughey, for two years until January 2007, all of which didn’t work out because they were busy traveling and working across the Atlantic. Cruz met Javier Bardem for the first time on the set of Jamón, Jamón in 1992, but they didn’t become a couple until they started working together in the 2008 film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. They had also worked together in the 1997 Live Flesh film, but didn’t share any on-screen time. Cruz then got married with her long-term partner Javier Bardem at a friend’s house in the Bahamas in a small ceremony with just family members present.
After Cruz got married to Javier Bardem, she got pregnant with her first child. When she was seven months pregnant with her son Leo, she was completing the film Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Then, on January 22, 2011, she gave birth at the age of 36 to her first child, Leonardo Encinas Cruz. Six months later, she returned to work to begin filming, To Rome with Love (2012). A year later, she gave birth to her second child at age 39, a daughter, Luna Encinas Cruz, on July 22, 2013. After Cruz returned to work 11 months after giving birth to her daughter Luna, she began filming Ma Ma (2015).
“In terms of work, it always seems like it’s a first date. I mean, every time I go to the
movie set and start a project, I feel the same feeling the butterflies in my stomach, not having control over it-because acting is like that. That’s the beauty of it. You can always keep learning. There’s always more,” said Cruz.
Ma Ma’s 2015 film gave the character Magda, played by Cruz, a motherly insight of what it is like for a mother to lose hope and then regain hope while going through breast cancer treatment, and while pregnant at the same time. Breast cancer is no joke. It’s a cycle of love, fear, loss, and hope; hope that someday they will recover, even if it means going through the pain of having a mastectomy (removal of one or both breasts, partially or completely). Ma Ma is the second film Cruz has made about breast cancer, a film that brought attention to many mothers who are suffering through this transition. The first film that Cruz did for Breast Cancer Awareness was in 2008, a film called Elegy. This film made her audiences more aware of what could happen to a person that is going through getting breast cancer. For Breast Cancer Awareness month, you can look up more information on the National Breast Cancer Foundation website or the Breast Cancer Hotline 1-877-465-6636.
Although many other productions by Penelope Cruz are to come out this year. On December 24th, catch Cruz in the drama film, Parallel Mothers (2021), about the story of two mothers who give birth on the same day. It’s definitely a competitive parallel to many other recent of Cruz’s works! That’s not the end of it either: Rumor has it that two comical movies will be out by next year, a dramatized comedy, Official Competition (2022), is in the works where Penélope plays Lola Cuevas, and The 335 (2022), a comical action crime in which Cruz portrays a Colombian spy.
“There’s so much more I want to do. I refuse to get to 50 and wait at home for the phone to ring. In Spain, actresses work until they are old. That’s my plan.” —Penélope Cruz