Penelope Cruz can mark 2006 as the year she became a grown-up.
This seems an eccentric notion to apply to someone who turns 33 in April. But it’s understandable to those familiar with the career path that led to Cruz’s first Oscar nomination–for best actress in “Volver.”
As Raimunda, who’s struggling to protect her teenage daughter from harm while trying to run a successful business, Cruz carried herself with a potent combination of glamor and gravitas that, for many, was totally unexpected from a talented, magnetic performer who seemed stuck in the ingenue groove of her career.
Born in Madrid, she’s been professionally acting since she was 15, though her family remembers her re-enacting TV commercials and soap operas since she was a toddler. Her first big break came in 1992’s “Belle Epoque,” where she played one of four sisters competing for the love of an Army deserter. She began getting bigger parts in Spanish cinema and in 1997 made a huge impression on director Pedro Almodovar in the latter’s “Live Flesh.”
Although this is Cruz’s first Academy Award nod, in her native country of Spain, she has four lead-actress nominations for the Goya Awards, the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars. She has won the award twice, including for this year’s performance in “Volver.”
Almodovar cast her again in 1999’s “All About My Mother,” an international success that heightened Cruz’s visibility and, between 2000 and 2001, led to top-billed parts in American productions such as “All the Pretty Horses,” “Blow” and “Vanilla Sky.”
Her dark, sultry looks caught on with movie-goers, yet she seemed in those years more likely to provide fodder for the gossip pages with romances to leading men such as Tom Cruise and Matthew McConaughey than to assert her potential for greater roles.
Her friend Almodovar came to the rescue again with “Volver,” the first major role where she wasn’t playing a character poised precariously between childhood and womanhood. Since the film’s premiere at last spring’s Cannes International Film Festival, people are seeing Cruz in a dazzling new light. For a while, there were those who predicted she could be the first actress in a foreign-language film to win a best actress Oscar since Sophia Loren’s triumph for 1960’s “Two Women.”
“The flattery is good,” she says of her post- “Volver” buzz. “But it’s better not to expect too much from it. I don’t think you should too easily believe the bad or the good that you hear about you. You have to protect yourself always by reminding yourself that it’s the work first.”
