Word: cruz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...teen, Cruz, now 32, saw Almodóvar's erotic comedy Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, starring another of Spain's cinema exports indebted to the director, Antonio Banderas. From then on, "my main motivation to become an actress was to work with Pedro," Cruz says. "I was kind of obsessed about it." In 1997, at 22, she got her wish, playing a prostitute loudly giving birth on a Madrid city bus in Live Flesh. Then the director, whose films are populated by heroic transvestites and lovable hookers, cast her in another memorable maternity part in All About My Mother...
...intuition that the way to work with Pedro is to become a piece of clay," says Cruz. "With somebody like him, you cannot go in with doubts because it would be the most stupid behavior. I wish I would have that feeling every movie I do, but it's not that way." Cruz's trust seems daughterly, but, insists the director, who is 57, with a shock of gray hair, "I don't like when she looks at me like a paternal figure. I behave with her like if I were Orlando Bloom, a young, attractive man actor that...
Whatever he says, Almodóvar sounds awfully fatherly when he describes watching Cruz in her first English-language roles. "She was the first Spanish actress invited by Hollywood to come here and make a movie," says Almodóvar. "I felt very proud. And at the same time, I was frightened." Cruz was soon cast in seemingly can't-miss projects: Billy Bob Thornton's first post-- Sling Blade directing effort, a 2000 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, and Cameron Crowe's 2001 Vanilla Sky, a remake of a Spanish film Cruz had starred in. Forced...
Then there was the small part opposite Johnny Depp in Blow and a supporting role as Halle Berry's ranting psychiatric patient in Gothika. When a prison movie starring Halle Berry and Penélope Cruz can't find an audience, well, there's really something wrong. "I think she was not very lucky at the beginning because the projects she chose didn't meet the level of expectation everybody had, including myself," says Almod?...
Authentic and charming in her own language, Cruz became self-conscious and mousy in English. In 2005's Sahara, she played a doctor searching for a lost Civil War ship in, yes, the Sahara. (And you thought the pregnant nun was far-fetched.) Sahara was yet another wretched film that led to another high-profile offscreen romance for Cruz, who ended up dating co-star Matthew McConaughey for two years...