How Pedro Rescued Penelope

By Rebecca Winters Keegan

Penelope Cruz has arrived at the top, thanks, in part, to a bottom. The actress wears the plenteous prosthetic posterior under her 1950s Sophia Loren--inspired straight skirts and clingy cardigans in Pedro Almodovar's new film, Volver. "Mothers have beeg bottoms," the Spanish director of culturally charged films says in accented English as he sprawls on a sofa next to Cruz in his suite at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles. "Your curves here are natural," he says to her, cupping his hands on his chest, "but not here," he says, pointing to his seat. "You walk very lightly. I wanted someone linked to the earth, someone exhausted after cleaning houses." Cruz shrugs. "He's better at explaining the fake bottom than I am."

If Almodovar sounds--as he admits he does--"feelthy" when he discusses Cruz's physicality, "those eyes, her beautiful teets," she doesn't mind, since he has given the slender actress the weightiest role of her career (and also maybe because somehow it doesn't seem as feelthy coming from a gay guy). The Oscar-winning writer-director of Talk to Her and All About My Mother cast Cruz as the embodiment of motherhood in a movie about three generations of women surviving the wild winds of his home turf, La Mancha, Spain--winds that blow in fires, death and some superfluous men. Volver is Spanish for return. Fittingly, with the film, Almodovar has reclaimed the Madrid-born Cruz from the lost- property department of blond and bland Hollywood, where she has lived for the past several years carrying the cross of exoticism through a series of disappointing movies and tabloid-tracked relationships with Sexiest Man Alive--type guys. With Volver, she is prompting people to talk Oscar. If she nabs him, she will be the first actress to win one in a foreign-language film since Sophia Loren in 1961 for Two Women.

As a teen, Cruz, now 32, saw Almodovar'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, in 1999, this time as a pregnant, HIV-positive nun.

"I had an 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 can also flirt with her." At the mention of Bloom, whom she's rumored to be dating, the private Cruz screams like a teenager being teased. "Orlando doesn't flirt with me! He's just my friend!" But Almodovar, as he always does with Cruz, gets away with it. "Oh," he says, "I put Orlando as any young man who could flirt with you. I don't mean that we are going to make sex."

Whatever he says, Almodovar 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 Almodovar. "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 to utter absurd lines like "Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around," Cruz somehow became the girl of co-star Tom Cruise's dreams in Sky and his first post--Nicole Kidman girlfriend in real life.

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 Penelope 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 Almodovar.

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.

"I never want to sound ungrateful to the opportunities I get here," Cruz says. "But women are still a bit suppressed and invalidated in this industry in this country. I feel like I get healthy when I go back to Europe and work where it's more equal." Which brings us back to Almodovar's world, one in which women dominate. Volver took Almodovar six years to write. When he started, he envisioned Cruz in the smaller part of the daughter. As time passed, "I suddenly felt that I wanted something bigger," he says. "I thought, Why not make her the mother?" So Almodovar gave his modern-day Loren a disheveled up-do, some thick black eyeliner, that butt and a feminine character who gets to range from fragile to furious. Cruz balances screwball humor and a little vulgarity (there are fart jokes) with a screen-goddess glamour that can't be faked. "Pedro says I have a dark side," Cruz says, "and I know he does. Maybe that's another thing that connects us. I never feel completely safe next to him." Almodovar and Cruz interrupt each other constantly, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in English. "I feel like a couple who are friends, but they could be more," Almodovar says. "They are in that level where they can go another step. It can go on forever."

After Volver, Cruz filmed Manolete, an English-language movie due next year about the famed bullfighter, played by Adrien Brody. Next, she says, she is planning to produce--to develop the kind of roles for actresses that she isn't seeing--and is getting advice from her pal, Frida and Ugly Betty producer Salma Hayek. "Maybe I should work a little less," Cruz says. "Making Volver has spoiled me. I am having difficulty feeling something that pushes me enough that I want to go to the set again. I am comparing everything I read to these experiences with Pedro." Cruz is still keeping a house in Los Angeles, but as an actress, she has found her true home.