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Hot-Lifestyle-News: The best source for quality free celebrity photos, news, biographies and wallpapers presents Penelope Cruz. Penelope Cruz was born in Madrid on the 28th of April, 1974. Her father Eduardo was a retailer, her mother, Encarna, a hairdresser, the family living in the working-class suburb of Alcobendas, about five kilometres north of Madrid. She has one younger sister, Monica, a professional flamenco dancer and TV star, and one ... read full biography			Related Celebrity Pages: Salma Hayek

Biography - the story behind Penelope Cruz

Penelope Cruz was born in Madrid on the 28th of April, 1974. Her father Eduardo was a retailer, her mother, Encarna, a hairdresser, the family living in the working-class suburb of Alcobendas, about five kilometres north of Madrid. She has one younger sister, Monica, a professional flamenco dancer and TV star, and one brother, also younger, named after his father. Penelope Cruz was a natural performer, mimicking TV ads as soon as she could walk but, from the age of 4, it was dance that captured her imagination and dominated her life. She spent 9 years studying classical dance at Spain's National Conservatory, including three years of ballet with Angela Garrido, and a period of jazz dance with Raul Caballero.

National fame arrived at 16 when she began to present Kids' TV programmes on Tele 5. There also arrived her first breakdown. Having studied feverishly throughout her pre-pubescence and teens, then stepped straight into pressurised work, she had over-extended herself and, having to take a break to recover from over-exhaustion, paid the penalty. This would happen again, once worldwide fame was beckoning.

Now concentrating on movies, Cruz found her career progressed quickly. First, in 1991, would come an appearance in Rafael Alcazar's The Greek Labyrinth (not released till 1993), an erotic mystery where a woman became obsessed with a disappeared dancer and hired a detective to dig for clues among the man's gay lovers and dodgy acquaintances in Barcelona. Penelope would add to the intrigue as the detective's precocious daughter, entering the fray in the world's skimpiest pair of shorts and revealing a rapacious taste for older men. She'd then move on to Framed, a Lynda La Plante TV thriller (later hacked to movie-size) where Timothy Dalton played a con arrested for his part in a major heist and ostensibly grassing his partners. Holed up in a safe-house, he attempts to cannily corrupt his police guards, Cruz adding glamour as the sensuous Lola, one of playboy Dalton's girlfriends.

But her big success of that year would be Alejandro's Amenabar's Open Your Eyes, a wild ride of a psychological thriller that saw Eduardo Noriega find what he thought was true love with the stunning Penelope. Unfortunately, his nutty girlfriend has other ideas and causes a car wreck that sees her killed and Noriega terribly disfigured. And then it gets really strange as he wakes up in a prison hospital, clad in a mask, accused of murder and no longer sure what has happened. Has he had an operation to rebuild his face, is he back with Cruz, and why does he keep seeing his dead girlfriend's ghost? Messing with time and minds it was a brilliant movie, fabulously entertaining and very influential, and it would have a very marked effect of Cruz's career.

1999 would see her back with Pedro Almodovar for All About My Mother, where a woman wrecked by the death of her young son is gradually redeemed by the extraordinary characters she meets, including famous actresses, transvestite prostitutes and Penelope, playing a pregnant nun who runs a shelter. Amazingly, given the quality of Live Flesh and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Almodovar had not been Oscar-nominated since 1988's Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown. He was now, All About My Mother actually winning as Best Foreign Language film.

Keeping with the cream of the Spanish directorial crop, she now returned to Bigas Luna for Volaverunt, based on Antonio Larreta's historical novel about the Duchess of Alba, an inspiration for Goya, a liberal pioneer and a famous beauty. Bubbling over with desire, greed and court intrigue, the movie would see the great duchess poisoned at her own banquet, with Goya, the prime minister and Penelope (playing the prime minister's peasant mistress) being major suspects.

2000 brought Penelope Cruz her first US starring role, and her first major Stateside promotion. In Woman On Top, she played a Brazilian chef in San Francisco whose food and looks make her absolutely irresistible to men but who's cheated on by her husband due to her extreme motion sickness. The film was publicised with posters featuring Penelope Cruz naked beneath a scanty covering of chili peppers, and moved her into major pin-up territory. Now it was the Big League as she starred alongside Matt Damon in Billy Bob Thornton's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses. Here dispossessed Damon and friend Henry Thomas would ride into Mexico in 1949, seeking what remained of the Old West. Damon would find work as a horse-breaker for rancher Reuben Blades but would then fall for Blades' foxy daughter Penelope, a taboo-shattering relationship that would see the couple driven apart and forced to face the brutality of familial justice. Rumours were rife that a real-life relationship between Cruz and Damon caused him to split from Winona Ryder, but the pair insisted they were simply very good friends.

Now came the visually impressive Blow where she played Johnny Depp's high-maintenance wife in the true-life tale of smuggler George Jung, helping Pablo Escobar break into the US cocaine market in the Seventies (she came to nickname the defiantly idiosyncratic Depp "Martian"). Then came Captain Corelli's Mandolin, based on the bestselling novel by Louis de Bernieres, where she was the daughter of Greek village doctor John Hurt. First she falls for local fisherman Christian Bale then, when he leaves to fight the Nazis, she's romanced by Nicolas Cage, leader of an Italian holding force. Naturally, this relationship is frowned upon by the townsfolk and matters are made dangerously complicated when the German army arrives.

Back in America, Cruz's 2001 would end with the most important movie of her career thus far - Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky. This was an out-and-out remake of Amenabar's Open Your Eyes, with Cruz reprising her original role. The major difference was that her co-stars were now Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, with the resultant finances allowing for eye-popping effects, like Cruise running through an empty New York City and a breath-taking car crash. The first part of the movie did not bode well, with Cruise and Cruz involved in a meet-cute so sickly sweet it must surely have offed many diabetic viewers. But soon it settled, and began to capture much of the original's paranoia and weirdness.

Vanilla Sky would change Penelope's life drastically. Not only was it her first $100 million hit, lifting her high up the Hollywood ranking system, it also saw her begin a relationship with Cruise. This would have been high-profile at the best of times, but now, with Cruise having recently split from wife Nicole Kidman, it was a tabloid extravaganza, with Cruz coming off especially badly as the Matt Damon accusations had left her with an undeserved reputation as a man-thief.

Perhaps because of the furore, Penelope Cruz now kept her major Hollywood projects to a minimum, instead honing her craft in impressive cameos and European productions. 2002 would see her reunite with Billy Bob Thornton for the comic Waking Up In Reno, where Thornton, Patrick Swayze and their wives Natasha Richardson and Charlize Theron cross the country on a trip to a monster truck rally, on the way discovering the roots of their personal dissatisfactions. Penelope Cruz would pop up as a Reno hooker who, taking a fancy to Swayze, would provoke him into realising what he already had. The next year would bring another brief role in Masked And Anonymous, a quite incredible Bob Dylan vanity project where the great man would play - surprise, surprise - a vaguely messianic, hugely enigmatic singer pulled from jail for a benefit concert. Dylan's name would draw a plethora of stars, including Jessica Lange, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer, Jeff Bridges, Mickey Rourke, Christian Slater and Giovanni Ribisi, with Penelope playing the religious girlfriend of Bridges' rock journalist, a massive Dylan fan improbably named Pagan Lace and prone to spouting lines like "I love his songs because they are not precise - they are completely open to interpretation". It was not an embarrassing performance, simply an embarrassing script.

Very different would be Penelope's next Hollywood outing, the stylish psychological horror flick Gothika. Here prison psychiatrist Halle Berry is involved in an accident and wakes to find herself banged up in her own jail and accused of murdering her husband. Cruz would stand out as one of Berry's former patients, now a fellow inmate, a supremely witchy woman who believes she's being sexually abused by Satan (which she rather enjoys) and explains to Berry that, as an inmate, no one will ever believe a word she says.

Stepping far from this high-budget insanity, Cruz now returned to Europe for the Italo-Spanish production Don't Move. Here a surgeon involved in an accident with his young daughter would recall the events of 15 years before when he had a fling with a destitute Penelope, remarkably playing a blowsy, gap-toothed, bow-legged tramp living on a building site. Their relationship, which begins with him raping her (again, she quite likes it, having been raped by her father from a young age) and ends with her pregnant, would allow the movie to examine the nature of parenthood, passion, commitment and the awful finality of the choices we make. Cruz would once again find herself Goya-nominated.

Back in the States, Penelope would join Susan Sarandon in the ensemble cast of Chazz Palminteri's Noel, which tied together the tales of several New Yorkers, each seeking redemption on Christmas Eve. Penelope would play the long-suffering fiancee of cop Paul Walker, unable to curb his explosive jealousy even with private sexy dances and eventually having to postpone the wedding. Walker, meanwhile, is being tailed by a besotted Alan Arkin, who, strangely, believes the cop to be the reincarnation of his own dead wife.

Following this Yuletide oddity, Cruz would finally see the release of the delayed Head In The Clouds, another sweeping romantic epic that would see her reunite with Charlize Theron. This had student Stuart Townsend smitten by notorious free-spirit Theron and, several years later, invited to join her in Paris. Here he finds she's a famous photographer, living with Penelope, a former stripper (and probably whore) who's now her model and lover. Cruz is also training as a nurse to help fight the fascists in Spain and draws Townsend into her idealism as war descends and the friends are tossed about on waves of heroism, espionage, betrayal and death.

Head In The Clouds would see only a very limited release, but still 2004 would see Penelope dominate the headlines as her relationship with Tom Cruise now came to an end. Soon she would be seeing Matthew McConaughey, co-star of her next production, Sahara. Based on the bestselling Clive Cussler novel, this would see McConaughey as Dirk Pitt, an Indiana Jones-type adventurer who's searching for treasure on the Nile. Having saved scientist Penelope from assassination, he's drawn into her investigation into why thousands of North Africans are being driven to madness, cannibalism and death, and together they battle tyrants and billionaire industrialists as they follow clues leading all the way back to the killing of Abraham Lincoln.

The movie would arrive in 2005, another busy year for Cruz. Aside from this epic, she'd see the release of Chromophobia, directed by Martha Fiennes and concerning the destruction of old London society by new American attitudes towards money, power, beauty and success. Another ensemble piece, this would see Damian Lewis suffering at the hands of his manic wife Kristin Scott Thomas and insufferably attention-seeking child. His father, Ian Holm, meanwhile, has had an illegitimate love child by his mistress, Penelope, a whore dying of liver cancer whose social worker, Rhys Ifans, can't help prying into her past and present. And then, as one friend (Fiennes brother, Ralph) lies horribly beaten, another (Ben Chaplin) comes up with a plan that will make him a star but betray everyone around him. It was fascinating, well-made and brilliantly acted stuff.

Cruz is clearly keen to balance a Hollywood career with work in Spain and the rest of Europe. She's also begun to pace herself better. After filming All The Pretty Horses, she went directly to India to shoot a documentary for the Spanish Sabera Foundation (set up by former boyfriend Nacho Cano) aiming to raise money for deprived children - they've already built a home, a school and a clinic for homeless girls and TB sufferers. On her return she collapsed again, as she had done back at the age of 16. She quit smoking, returned to vegetarianism (she'd earlier been a strict veggie for some years) and began practising meditation. She plans to be around for a long while yet.

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