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Cruz is quick to characterize herself as “very grateful” for the parts she has landed in big Hollywood productions. Her credits include a starring role opposite Johnny Depp in Ted Demme’s cautionary drug tale Blow (2001), a turn as Nicolas Cage’s love interest in John Madden’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) and a spooky performance in support of Halle Berry’s lead in Mathieu Kassovitz and Thom Oliphant’s psychological thriller Gothika (2003). But the actress says she wants more challenges in the movies she makes in the U.S. “I feel I can do more,” she says. “I feel there are a lot of things that I haven’t done yet here.” For example, Cruz says, “I haven’t done comedy in English; I want to do that.” She’d like to be in a Woody Allen movie at some point, Cruz says, and would also happily make another movie with Cameron Crowe, who directed her in Vanilla Sky. “I want to work with Scorsese, Gus Van Sant and the Coen brothers,” she adds.
As an actress whose best work has come in dark and demanding films, Cruz not surprisingly looks upon her trio of roles in Almodóvar movies as career milestones. Their first collaboration came in Live Flesh (1997), a film that opens with a prostitute (played by Cruz) giving birth on a city bus. Cruz’s Isabel quickly becomes a local celebrity— Madrid’s public transit system comically awards her a lifetime pass— and although she’s not around by the time her son Victor rights the wayward path of his life, her presence is felt throughout. In one of the movie’s many memorable scenes, Victor visits his mother’s grave and thanks her for his inheritance; he’s calculated how many men Isabel had to sleep with in order to leave behind a small but helpful sum, and the weight of it all has hit him hard. All About My Mother (1999), a movie that Almodóvar dedicated in part “to all women who act,” finds Cruz playing another pregnant woman, but one coming at her expectant months from an entirely different place. Cruz is Rosa, a Barcelona nun who counsels prostitutes and transvestites and becomes a sort of accidental surrogate mother for a woman who has recently lost a teenage son. The film captures Cruz at her most girlish and vulnerable; her performance is subtle and idiosyncratic, and though the movie belongs to other actors—most notably Argentine actress Cecilia Roth in the lead role—Cruz is nonetheless wonderful.
Volver represents the apex (for the moment, anyhow) of the Almodovar-Cruz professional pairing. Cruz plays Raimunda, a working mother in Madrid who is soldiering through a series of life-altering events. Translated, the film’s title means “to return” or “coming back,” and so it is that Raimunda’s long-dead mother (the Spanish actress Carmen Maura, another Almodóvar veteran) makes an unexpected homecoming. As Almodóvar succinctly put it on his Website not long ago, “More than about death itself, the screenplay talks about the rich culture that surrounds death in the region of La Mancha, where I was born. It is about the way (not tragic at all) in which various female characters, of different generations, deal with this culture.”
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by watch hindi movies online free on 12/30/10 at 8:03 pm
she is brilliant! Any new movies coming up ?
- Comment by bollywood samachar on 6/06/11 at 7:56 pm
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This story was published in the Fall 2006 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Like a Dream Come True / With an arresting performance in Pedro Almodóvar's Volver, Spanish superstar Penélope Cruz finally makes American audiences—and moviemakers—take notice of her talent
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