In Cruz control

Penelope Cruz

A plush hotel suite overlooking Kensington Palace Gardens seems an apt place for an audience with Penelope Cruz. After all, she is new Hollywood royalty, even if she is entirely bereft of airs and graces. Behind her, a framed photograph of Sophia Loren is a pertinent reminder of the last foreign star to make such an impact in the United States.

It is 11.30am, too early for her Mediterranean body-clock. She has just flown in from Los Angeles and as she is a 12-hours-of-sleep-a-night girl she looks a little tired around her deep brown eyes.

Grumbling about jet-lag, she does not look like she has "the ability to create fire with any object or moving thing", as director Cameron Crowe once pronounced of her. Wearing a black dress that fits snugly over her petite 1.7m frame, she cuts a solemn figure. She hit 30 last year, but says it hasn't caused her to become more introspective. "Reflecting on everything is something I've tried to do since I was a little girl. I just can't help asking myself questions and I get very impatient about answers. So that hasn't been different because of turning 30. I've had a very curious personality all my life."

Despite becoming the face for the US designer Ralph Lauren, her love affair with America has been bumpy. In Hollywood, the so-called Spanish enchantress has become more famous for bewitching her leading men than for her films. While she was making All the Pretty Horses with Matt Damon, he split with long-term girlfriend Winona Ryder. During Captain Corelli's Mandolin, rumours persisted that she and Nicolas Cage, then married to Patricia Arquette, were an item. And shortly after Tom Cruise separated from Nicole Kidman, he and Cruz - co-stars in Vanilla Sky - began a three-year relationship that ended 12 months ago. No wonder Damon once nicknamed her Trouble.

Nothing Cruz has made in America has yet to top her homegrown work. "I think she works much better in Spanish than English," says fellow Spanish diva Paz Vega. It's easy to see what she means, judging by many of the 20 films Cruz made before her first US outing in Stephen Frears' 1998 film The Hi-Lo Country, in which, ironically, she played a Mexican who loses her cowboy lover to Patricia Arquette.

Vanilla Sky, a remake of Alejandro Amenabar's 1997 film Abre los Ojos, is a case in point. Replaying the same role she shined in for Amenabar, her exuberance was rather lost in translation, perhaps overshadowed by the fuss over her burgeoning relationship with Cruise.

Rarely has there been such a drastic "before and after" split in an actor's canon. With straight-to-video clunkers like the Bob Dylan movie Masked and Anonymous and the trailer-trash comedy Waking Up In Reno cluttering her CV, it's clear she has been misused and misunderstood in Hollywood.

"They have offered me some very interesting things, so I'm very grateful for the opportunity," she says, unwilling to bite the hand that feeds. "I have been working in Europe since I was 14 and in America for only five years. It takes time, but I like difficult stuff. I don't want to play myself or play the same thing twice."

In Spain, she has acted for most of her country's leading directors, playing sweet and innocent, or outlandish and extreme. After taking a cameo in Pedro Almodovar's 1997 film Live Flesh, as a pregnant woman

who gives birth on a bus to the film's future hero, she reunited with him to play a Prada-wearing nun with Aids in his sublime All About My Mother.

For Fernando Trueba, she was the virginal Luz in the good-natured comedy Belle Epoque at the outset of her career. In their second film together, 1998's La Nina de tus Ojos (The Girl of Your Dreams), she was cast as an actress-singer in Nazi Germany, fending off the amorous advances of Joseph Goebbels.

It won her a Goya, the Spanish equivalent of an Oscar, and cemented her reputation as her country's leading star since Antonio Banderas headed for Hollywood.

Over the next few months, the schizophrenic nature of Cruz's career will be further exemplified. In Sergio Castellitto's Non ti Muovere (Don't Move), she delivers a mesmerising turn as the downtrodden and destitute Italia, a cleaning woman who becomes embroiled in a torrid affair with a surgeon.

Bow-legged, gap-toothed, and with black mascara smeared across her face, Cruz deliberately despoils her image to the point where, when she first appears on screen, you barely recognise her. "I don't deserve extra credit for not being afraid of looking ugly," she says.

Based on an Italian bestseller by Margaret Mazzantini, the story unfolds as the family-man Timoteo reflects on his fling with Italia 15 years earlier, while his daughter lies in intensive care at the hospital in which he works. The film's most controversial aspect is that when Timoteo first meets Italia he rapes her. Italia seems almost to accept this, leading some critics to dismiss the film as a male fantasy that invites us to sympathise with the offender.

Cruz disagrees. "When I got the script, somebody told me, 'don't even bother because the woman falls in love with a guy who rapes her'. When I read it, I found the movie wasn't about that. I wouldn't do a movie that supports rape or that kind of behaviour. In life, nothing is black and white. But this is a piece of truth. It talks about the pain that comes from somebody who is on the road to self-destruction. That doesn't make it cool or attractive."

Her other new film, Sahara, is an adaptation of a Clive Cussler novel, one of 14 featuring his swashbuckling hero Dirk Pitt (played by Matthew McConaughey). It is a halfhearted attempt to replicate "the energy of Indiana Jones", as Cruz puts it.

Directed by Breck Eisner, the son of the soon-to-be-stepping down Disney CEO Michael, it is the sort of committee-made film you might expect from the offspring of a studio executive. Cruz plays Dr Eva Rojas, a compassionate World Health Organisation representative who becomes embroiled in Pitt's crazy quest to find a sunken battleship. While it is not implausible to envisage Cruz with a medical degree, it is just the sort of assembly-line role studios foist on her.

Cruz identified with her character in Sahara, having spent some time in India assisting Mother Theresa's charity work. "I have been involved in adventures, trips that changed my life," she says. "I've been in even more difficult places, like the time I spent in Calcutta."

She was asked to photograph Mother Teresa on the streets, and has also been to Nepal to document Tibetan refugees with her camera. Cruz says that after seeing poverty close at hand, it made her want to adopt - "and give a child a future" - though she was refused because she was single.

Most of the attention on Sahara, of course, will be about the fact that she and McConaughey, have been enjoying a tentative relationship. "We became good friends, and a month later it became something different." They are already set to make a second film, The Loop, a romance between a highway patrolman and a librarian.

Cruz has always made it a policy, whether her A-list affairs were true or false, to flatly deny anything was going on - until that became impossible. Such secrecy seems at odds with her upbringing in Madrid. The daughter of a mechanic and a hairdresser, she was a hyperactive child with a passion for poetry, music and flamenco. Signed up for ballet classes when she was 4, she admits: "I just wanted people to look at me." In early adolescence her attentions switched to acting.

Spotted in a talent contest, she made sporadic appearances on television before, at 17, becoming a national fantasy in her 1992 debut film Jamon, Jamon. She played a tousled minx, and the adulation frightened her to the point that she cut her hair short and avoided love scenes for years afterwards.

"If I would have done more of the same," she says, "it would've been the Lolita thing for three years then bye-bye to my career."

Although she lives in Los Angeles, Cruz regularly flies to Madrid and she phones her family every day. Homesick for Spanish food and late opening hours, she is evidently also missing her beloved Almodovar.

She is set to star in his next film, Volver, a comedy that she says "is the best thing he's ever written", and she is also committed to a second script he has penned for her. Her face lights up when talking about him.

"I'm an actress because of his movies - I think he's a genius," she says. "It's my dream. To go there and be in Spain for four months working with him is the perfect situation. No other project, no other director could make me happier - in a place where my family is also."

While entrusting him with getting her career back on track, she has also just completed Chromophobia, a London-set ensemble drama in which she plays a prostitute dying of cancer. It co-stars Kristin Scott Thomas and Ralph Fiennes. "I want to do something that makes me feel when I read it," she says. "I don't want to be bored, where I think, 'Okay, I already know how to do that'. I don't like the easy stuff."

After being blinded by the bright Hollywood lights, it seems as if Cruz wants to be a serious actress again.


LOWDOWN


WHO: Penelope Cruz BORN: 28 April 1974, Madrid, Spain


STILL BEST KNOWN AS: Tom Cruise's former girlfriend


KEY ROLES: Jamon Jamon (1992), Belle Epoque (1992), Abre Los Ojos (1997), Woman On Top (2000), All The Pretty Horses (2000), Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001), Blow (2001), Vanilla Sky (2001)


LATEST: Sahara opens Thursday- INDEPENDENT