By Catherine O' Brien
'My face will change as I get older, but that's OK. The people who love me love me for who I am,' says Penélope
With her star continuing to ascend, Penélope Cruz has shown that she’s far more than just another pretty A-list face, even bagging an Oscar to prove it. But, as she tells Catherine O’Brien, her most important project is still to come
When Richard Burton first worked with Elizabeth Taylor he complained: ‘She’s just not doing anything.’ When he saw her impact on screen, however, her very stillness took his breath away. Penélope Cruz not only shares Taylor’s hypnotic, raven-haired beauty, but you only have to spend a little time in her company to appreciate that she possesses the same gasp-inducing serenity. It is evident as she sits on a hotel sofa, fixing you with her limpid brown eyes. It’s evident in her many film performances and it radiates in these latest images – shot by Mario Testino to launch Penélope as the new face of Lancôme’s Trésor perfume.
She is, she says, in her husky, heavily accented English, a highly ‘visual’ person. ‘Since I was a very, very little girl, I was always amazed by the feeling that I could get from an image, like the ads Lancôme did with Isabella Rossellini for Trésor. With no words, no explanations – just an image can take you to a world and make you feel very real. But also magical.’
It is eight years since I last met Penélope. Back then, she was dating Tom Cruise and fighting to establish a reputation as a credible actress. Today, her professional credentials are indisputable – she is the holder of a best supporting actress Oscar for her role in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona – and her personal life has moved on, too. Three years ago, she began dating fellow Spanish actor Javier Bardem, star of No Country for Old Men. The couple got married earlier this month in a small, family ceremony in the Bahamas. Their wedding follows months of mounting speculation about their relationship – but they work assiduously to keep things low-profile. ‘I have nothing to hide, but there are some things I have to keep private,’ she says.
However, at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where Javier picked up a best actor award, he could not resist telling the audience: ‘I share this joy with my friend, my companion, my love, Penélope: I owe you a lot and I love you so much.’
From left: Penélope with her film-star husband Javier Bardem at the 2010 Goya Awards in Spain; and with her mentor Pedro Almodóvar
Penélope and Javier’s relationship actually goes way back, almost two decades, to their co-starring in the Spanish art-house comedy drama Jamón Jamón – a film bursting with sexual energy that earned them both nominations for a Goya, the Spanish equivalent of an Oscar. Penélope, now 36, was just 17 at the time, while Javier was 22 – and maybe it was simply not the right time and place because, in many ways, they seem to have been destined for each other.
Javier was born in the Canary Islands, the youngest of three children, and raised in Madrid after his parents separated. His mother, Pilar Bardem, is a respected actress; his grandfather was an actor, too, and his uncle a director.
Penélope’s upbringing was ostensibly more conventional. The eldest of three children born to Eduardo, a shopkeeper, and his hairdresser wife Encama, she grew up in a high-rise Madrid suburb where, for most of her childhood, she wanted to be a ballet dancer. Her parents first sent her to classes at the age of four to burn off some of her excess energy. ‘They saw that I was calmer when I came back home. So they said, “OK, you are going back tomorrow!”’ she recalls.
She later won a place at the prestigious Conservatorio Nacional, but when she was 14, she was discovered by agent and talent scout Katrina Bayonas. ‘She blew everybody’s socks off,’ Bayonas explains. ‘She had this amazing connection to everything an actor needs: what was going on inside, her emotions. She was very disciplined, very well trained.’ Penélope was also clearly very loyal – more than 20 years on, Bayonas remains her agent. ‘It has to go both ways,’ she says. ‘Katrina has also been very loyal to me.’
Penélope believes her core training took place not at ballet school or in the early TV commercials in which she appeared, but in the hours she spent, in the holidays and after school, sitting in her mother’s hairdressing salon. ‘I always looked at that place like my first acting school. Because I really saw what the women who came there were looking for. It wasn’t just about hair. They walked in feeling one way, and left feeling more confident and much closer to their dream of what they wanted to look like. And sometimes it was even like a little therapy session for them.
'For me, it was interesting to sit there and pretend that I was doing homework, but really to be observing their behaviour. They would share the most intimate details about their lives, and they felt very safe in that place. It was always beautiful to see them, especially in the last moment when they were done and looked in the mirror and felt good about themselves. Which is, we all know, not the most important thing on the planet, but an act that means something. To take care of yourself and to feel comfortable in your skin is very beautiful.’
Despite her ravishing looks, Penélope herself didn’t always feel comfortable in her own skin. In common with most women, she experimented with her appearance, at one point dyeing her hair peroxide blonde – a mistake she quickly rectified. ‘I didn’t like it and I got some strange reactions.’ She claims that, even today, ‘I’m not great at my own make-up.’
When it comes to ambition, however, she’s always been utterly focused. The Spanish film industry is one of the world’s most successful, but she was determined to make it on to the international stage. She and Javier both used their success in Jamón Jamón astutely, avoiding subsequent offers that threatened to typecast them.
‘I’d close down all those teenage magazines that encourage young girls to diet’
Above all, Penélope says, she looks for diversity in what she does. ‘I don’t want to play myself, or the same character twice. When I have this feeling of, “I need to do this, I want to experience and understand this character”, I take that as a sign.’
Javier has credited Pedro Almodóvar, arguably the most successful Spanish film director of his generation, for taking his career to a different level. Penélope goes even further – Almodóvar is her greatest mentor. They have made four films together: Live Flesh (a Ruth Rendell mystery which starred Javier), All About My Mother, Volver and Broken Embraces. She calls him her ‘favourite director’ while he compares her to both Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren and admits that, though he adores his other actresses, it is for Penélope that he feels ‘real passion’.
It is difficult to see how, without Almodóvar, Penélope would have proved herself as more than a pretty face in Hollywood. Woody Allen revealed that he wrote the part of the sexy but fiery Maria Elena in Vicky Cristina Barcelona especially for her after admiring her resoluteness and strength of character in Volver.
Pairing her on screen with Javier was pure genius. Allen so trusted the spirited dynamic between them, he let them improvise their explosive arguments in their native Spanish. ‘I had no idea what they were saying. I just thought, I’m sure it’s great,’ he said. That Penélope subsequently picked up an Oscar for her performance proved his hunch right.
However, Penélope’s interest in other people, honed in her mother’s salon, doesn’t just extend to research for her film roles. She has donated money and time to charities including (Red), a project to help eradicate Aids in Africa, and once worked alongside Mother Teresa in Calcutta, assisting in a leprosy clinic for a week, an experience she describes as ‘the most intense of my life, and really life-changing in many ways’.
She also has several other strands to her professional life. Becoming the face of Trésor is the latest in a long line of product endorsements, but it’s one that she feels particularly passionate about as it’s the fragrance’s 20th anniversary and ‘it has a lot of memories for me’. She designs clothes with her sister Mónica, 33, an actress and dancer. They have produced collections for Mango and are about to start on another for a European outlet. ‘My sister has a real talent for that. We both think about ideas and we get together and refine them. Most of the time, even though we have been apart, we have thought about exactly the same concept, which makes it very easy.’
Earlier this year, Penélope was invited to edit an edition of French Vogue, and used the opportunity to commission a provocative shoot with plus-size model Crystal Renn. She has strong views about the pressures on young girls to be thin.
‘I would close down all those teenage magazines that encourage young girls to diet,’ she says. ‘Who says that to be pretty you have to be thin? Some people look better thin and some don’t. There is almost a standard being created where only thin is acceptable. The influence of those magazines on girls as young as 13 is horrific.’
Penélope feels almost as strongly about the pressure on women to stay young for ever. ‘I never want to lie about my age,’ she says. ‘If I look around at the actresses I admire, they are all women who have not fought growing older, but embraced it – women like Sophia Loren or Audrey Hepburn.
‘To take care of yourself and to feel comfortable in your
skin is very beautiful’
‘I was very close to both of my grandmothers growing up – they lived long into old age and they were always beautiful to me. They loved life and it showed in their faces. Of course, my face will change as I get older, but that’s OK. The people who love me love me for what I am. They love me for that mixture of things that makes anyone love another person, and those things will still be there when I am 40, 60 or 80. It’s a good thing to be old. Because when you get older, that means you haven’t died yet, right? And when I do get older, I want to have the grace to be proud of it, not to lie about it or try to fight it.’
Perhaps one of Penélope’s most refreshing qualities is her realism. She says she has learnt enough about herself to know that her best quality, ‘which is how stubborn I am’, is also her worst defect. She has a perfectionist streak, too. But while once she was making three or four movies a year, now she’s pacing herself. This summer
she’ll be working on Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, but after that ‘I will rest again’, she says. ‘I want to have more time to live life.’ That means, presumably, more time with her new husband. She has talked before about being keen to have children but ‘when I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.’
The Trésor fragrance range comes in eau de toilette and eau de parfum, from £32, available nationwide, lancome.co.uk
PENELOPE’S PASSIONS
Who are your favourite designers?
John Galliano, Karl Lagerfeld, Oscar de la Renta, Alber Elbaz and Dolce & Gabbana.
What is in your make-up bag at the moment?
Lancôme’s L’Absolu Rouge hydrating lipstick, Hypnôse mascara and Secret de Vie moisturiser.
What are your biggest food indulgences?
Bread and pasta, Coca-Cola and fried food.
What is your favourite book?
The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger. I became obsessed with Holden Caulfield, the main character of the book, and I dreamt I was him when I was 17.
Where are your favourite cultural hotspots?
El Prado Museum in Madrid and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Who inspires you?
Meryl Streep. I always think, ‘How can she be so good?’ There really is nobody like her. Nobody has done as many great things, one after another.
source: dailymail
'My face will change as I get older, but that's OK. The people who love me love me for who I am,' says PenélopeWith her star continuing to ascend, Penélope Cruz has shown that she’s far more than just another pretty A-list face, even bagging an Oscar to prove it. But, as she tells Catherine O’Brien, her most important project is still to come
When Richard Burton first worked with Elizabeth Taylor he complained: ‘She’s just not doing anything.’ When he saw her impact on screen, however, her very stillness took his breath away. Penélope Cruz not only shares Taylor’s hypnotic, raven-haired beauty, but you only have to spend a little time in her company to appreciate that she possesses the same gasp-inducing serenity. It is evident as she sits on a hotel sofa, fixing you with her limpid brown eyes. It’s evident in her many film performances and it radiates in these latest images – shot by Mario Testino to launch Penélope as the new face of Lancôme’s Trésor perfume.
She is, she says, in her husky, heavily accented English, a highly ‘visual’ person. ‘Since I was a very, very little girl, I was always amazed by the feeling that I could get from an image, like the ads Lancôme did with Isabella Rossellini for Trésor. With no words, no explanations – just an image can take you to a world and make you feel very real. But also magical.’
It is eight years since I last met Penélope. Back then, she was dating Tom Cruise and fighting to establish a reputation as a credible actress. Today, her professional credentials are indisputable – she is the holder of a best supporting actress Oscar for her role in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona – and her personal life has moved on, too. Three years ago, she began dating fellow Spanish actor Javier Bardem, star of No Country for Old Men. The couple got married earlier this month in a small, family ceremony in the Bahamas. Their wedding follows months of mounting speculation about their relationship – but they work assiduously to keep things low-profile. ‘I have nothing to hide, but there are some things I have to keep private,’ she says.
However, at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where Javier picked up a best actor award, he could not resist telling the audience: ‘I share this joy with my friend, my companion, my love, Penélope: I owe you a lot and I love you so much.’
From left: Penélope with her film-star husband Javier Bardem at the 2010 Goya Awards in Spain; and with her mentor Pedro AlmodóvarPenélope and Javier’s relationship actually goes way back, almost two decades, to their co-starring in the Spanish art-house comedy drama Jamón Jamón – a film bursting with sexual energy that earned them both nominations for a Goya, the Spanish equivalent of an Oscar. Penélope, now 36, was just 17 at the time, while Javier was 22 – and maybe it was simply not the right time and place because, in many ways, they seem to have been destined for each other.
Javier was born in the Canary Islands, the youngest of three children, and raised in Madrid after his parents separated. His mother, Pilar Bardem, is a respected actress; his grandfather was an actor, too, and his uncle a director.
Penélope’s upbringing was ostensibly more conventional. The eldest of three children born to Eduardo, a shopkeeper, and his hairdresser wife Encama, she grew up in a high-rise Madrid suburb where, for most of her childhood, she wanted to be a ballet dancer. Her parents first sent her to classes at the age of four to burn off some of her excess energy. ‘They saw that I was calmer when I came back home. So they said, “OK, you are going back tomorrow!”’ she recalls.
She later won a place at the prestigious Conservatorio Nacional, but when she was 14, she was discovered by agent and talent scout Katrina Bayonas. ‘She blew everybody’s socks off,’ Bayonas explains. ‘She had this amazing connection to everything an actor needs: what was going on inside, her emotions. She was very disciplined, very well trained.’ Penélope was also clearly very loyal – more than 20 years on, Bayonas remains her agent. ‘It has to go both ways,’ she says. ‘Katrina has also been very loyal to me.’
Penélope believes her core training took place not at ballet school or in the early TV commercials in which she appeared, but in the hours she spent, in the holidays and after school, sitting in her mother’s hairdressing salon. ‘I always looked at that place like my first acting school. Because I really saw what the women who came there were looking for. It wasn’t just about hair. They walked in feeling one way, and left feeling more confident and much closer to their dream of what they wanted to look like. And sometimes it was even like a little therapy session for them.
'For me, it was interesting to sit there and pretend that I was doing homework, but really to be observing their behaviour. They would share the most intimate details about their lives, and they felt very safe in that place. It was always beautiful to see them, especially in the last moment when they were done and looked in the mirror and felt good about themselves. Which is, we all know, not the most important thing on the planet, but an act that means something. To take care of yourself and to feel comfortable in your skin is very beautiful.’Despite her ravishing looks, Penélope herself didn’t always feel comfortable in her own skin. In common with most women, she experimented with her appearance, at one point dyeing her hair peroxide blonde – a mistake she quickly rectified. ‘I didn’t like it and I got some strange reactions.’ She claims that, even today, ‘I’m not great at my own make-up.’
When it comes to ambition, however, she’s always been utterly focused. The Spanish film industry is one of the world’s most successful, but she was determined to make it on to the international stage. She and Javier both used their success in Jamón Jamón astutely, avoiding subsequent offers that threatened to typecast them.
‘I’d close down all those teenage magazines that encourage young girls to diet’
Above all, Penélope says, she looks for diversity in what she does. ‘I don’t want to play myself, or the same character twice. When I have this feeling of, “I need to do this, I want to experience and understand this character”, I take that as a sign.’
Javier has credited Pedro Almodóvar, arguably the most successful Spanish film director of his generation, for taking his career to a different level. Penélope goes even further – Almodóvar is her greatest mentor. They have made four films together: Live Flesh (a Ruth Rendell mystery which starred Javier), All About My Mother, Volver and Broken Embraces. She calls him her ‘favourite director’ while he compares her to both Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren and admits that, though he adores his other actresses, it is for Penélope that he feels ‘real passion’.
It is difficult to see how, without Almodóvar, Penélope would have proved herself as more than a pretty face in Hollywood. Woody Allen revealed that he wrote the part of the sexy but fiery Maria Elena in Vicky Cristina Barcelona especially for her after admiring her resoluteness and strength of character in Volver.
Pairing her on screen with Javier was pure genius. Allen so trusted the spirited dynamic between them, he let them improvise their explosive arguments in their native Spanish. ‘I had no idea what they were saying. I just thought, I’m sure it’s great,’ he said. That Penélope subsequently picked up an Oscar for her performance proved his hunch right.
However, Penélope’s interest in other people, honed in her mother’s salon, doesn’t just extend to research for her film roles. She has donated money and time to charities including (Red), a project to help eradicate Aids in Africa, and once worked alongside Mother Teresa in Calcutta, assisting in a leprosy clinic for a week, an experience she describes as ‘the most intense of my life, and really life-changing in many ways’.
She also has several other strands to her professional life. Becoming the face of Trésor is the latest in a long line of product endorsements, but it’s one that she feels particularly passionate about as it’s the fragrance’s 20th anniversary and ‘it has a lot of memories for me’. She designs clothes with her sister Mónica, 33, an actress and dancer. They have produced collections for Mango and are about to start on another for a European outlet. ‘My sister has a real talent for that. We both think about ideas and we get together and refine them. Most of the time, even though we have been apart, we have thought about exactly the same concept, which makes it very easy.’Earlier this year, Penélope was invited to edit an edition of French Vogue, and used the opportunity to commission a provocative shoot with plus-size model Crystal Renn. She has strong views about the pressures on young girls to be thin.
‘I would close down all those teenage magazines that encourage young girls to diet,’ she says. ‘Who says that to be pretty you have to be thin? Some people look better thin and some don’t. There is almost a standard being created where only thin is acceptable. The influence of those magazines on girls as young as 13 is horrific.’
Penélope feels almost as strongly about the pressure on women to stay young for ever. ‘I never want to lie about my age,’ she says. ‘If I look around at the actresses I admire, they are all women who have not fought growing older, but embraced it – women like Sophia Loren or Audrey Hepburn.
‘To take care of yourself and to feel comfortable in your
skin is very beautiful’
‘I was very close to both of my grandmothers growing up – they lived long into old age and they were always beautiful to me. They loved life and it showed in their faces. Of course, my face will change as I get older, but that’s OK. The people who love me love me for what I am. They love me for that mixture of things that makes anyone love another person, and those things will still be there when I am 40, 60 or 80. It’s a good thing to be old. Because when you get older, that means you haven’t died yet, right? And when I do get older, I want to have the grace to be proud of it, not to lie about it or try to fight it.’
Perhaps one of Penélope’s most refreshing qualities is her realism. She says she has learnt enough about herself to know that her best quality, ‘which is how stubborn I am’, is also her worst defect. She has a perfectionist streak, too. But while once she was making three or four movies a year, now she’s pacing herself. This summer
she’ll be working on Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, but after that ‘I will rest again’, she says. ‘I want to have more time to live life.’ That means, presumably, more time with her new husband. She has talked before about being keen to have children but ‘when I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.’
The Trésor fragrance range comes in eau de toilette and eau de parfum, from £32, available nationwide, lancome.co.uk
PENELOPE’S PASSIONS
Who are your favourite designers?John Galliano, Karl Lagerfeld, Oscar de la Renta, Alber Elbaz and Dolce & Gabbana.
What is in your make-up bag at the moment?
Lancôme’s L’Absolu Rouge hydrating lipstick, Hypnôse mascara and Secret de Vie moisturiser.
What are your biggest food indulgences?
Bread and pasta, Coca-Cola and fried food.
What is your favourite book?
The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger. I became obsessed with Holden Caulfield, the main character of the book, and I dreamt I was him when I was 17.
Where are your favourite cultural hotspots?
El Prado Museum in Madrid and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Who inspires you?
Meryl Streep. I always think, ‘How can she be so good?’ There really is nobody like her. Nobody has done as many great things, one after another.
source: dailymail
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