Cruz in full swing

Finally Penelope Cruz is being taken seriously in Hollywood. After years of playing superficial girlfriend roles to American stars, including former boyfriends Tom Cruise (Vanilla Sky) and Matthew McConaughey (Sahara), the 35-year-old Spanish actress is receiving strong awards attention.

It began in 2007 with her best actress Oscar nomination for Pedro Almodovar's Volver, it continued last year with her best supporting actress Oscar win for Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

She is unabashedly proud of her Oscar. "I took it everywhere I went," she gushes. "I even took it to the beach. It was like when I was five and they gave me one of those toys I'd always been asking for. I didn't want to leave it behind. It was an amazing experience to go through with my family there with me."

On Monday she's up for a Golden Globe after being nominated as best supporting actress in Rob Marshall's adaptation of the Broadway musical, Nine, while her new Almodovar movie, Broken Embraces, is up for best foreign film.

In Nine which is based on Fellini's 8 1/2, Cruz plays Carla the sexy mistress of an Italian Fellini-style director Guido (Daniel Day-Lewis) whose mid-life crisis triggers fantasies and memories of encounters with beautiful women who also include Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson, Marion Cotillard and Sophia Loren, to whom Cruz is often compared.

"It was great to work with Sophia, after admiring her for so long," she says. "It was funny when we went to Italy to do some of the filming, because when they said no one could talk to the press, she said, 'I'm Sophia Loren. The press can talk to me. I'm in charge of myself.' She's so warm and open and nice to everybody. It was very special."

It was the first time she had sung and danced on film, which required her to perform her sultry solo number A Call from the Vatican, dressed in not very much. But it was the singing that worried her more.

I'd been dancing since my childhood, even if I was out of training. Though singing never, so I took lessons for months and months. In the end we all had the same fear, but at the same time it was very exciting."

What was it like acting alongside Kidman who has a certain ex in common?

"We want to work together more, it was a great experience," she says, hardly going into specifics. "It was a great team of people helping each other and we all understood what the others were going through, because we all had to sing and dance and do new things."

Cruz is naturally pleased that Broken Embraces is also receiving Globes attention.

There's no doubting she has done most of her best dramatic work with Almodovar, whom she considers one of her best friends.

It had been her childhood dream, growing up in Alcobendas, 13 kilometres north of Madrid, to work with the Spanish master.

"I never really thought it would be possible, because nobody in my family or group of friends was making a living out of something related to art. But my parents were the first to buy a Betamax machine, so I decided to rent movies every day and I discovered the pleasure of watching cinema. I greatly admired Meryl Streep and Billy Wilder. I wondered, who are these people who make me feel this way? I was eight or nine years old when I discovered Pedro's movies, and I wanted to see everything he had done."

An extroverted child, Cruz, at 13, announced to her family that she wanted to be an actress. She'd been to Madrid to see Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down and was determined to be in one of Almodovar's movies.

"I was studying; I was in high school and in ballet classes at night and I was doing castings. I looked for an agent and she sent me away three times because I was a little girl, but I kept coming back. I'm still with her after all these years."

Cruz first met Almodovar at the age of 17, following her breakthrough movie, Jamon, Jamon, co-starring Javier Bardem, with whom she started a relationship after they starred together in the Allen film.

"Pedro asked me to come to his house. I remember I went half an hour earlier, looking at the terraces in the neighbourhood. I was very nervous and he said I was too young for Kika. He wrote me a letter a few years later, saying he'd write a character for me, then he called me for Live Flesh and now we've done four movies together."

In Broken Embraces, 60-year-old Almodovar's 17th feature, Cruz plays an actress appearing in a movie called Girls and Suitcases (Almodovar says the film-within-the-film refers to his early hit, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown).

Her actress is the mistress of an elderly businessman, who is funding the film, yet in true melodramatic style she falls for her younger director (Lluis Homar, from Bad Education). The story is told in flashbacks 14 years later as the now-blind director mourns the love of his past.

"I can't say it was an easy role," Cruz admits. "She's so different from me; she tries to be someone she isn't out of a survival instinct. The character in the movie is so different again.

"Sometimes we would do the two characters in one day, back and forth, and because of the different time periods there was often a lot of information we had to forget. It was complicated."

Meticulous about every detail, Almodovar personally travelled to buy the outfits for Cruz's blonde diva character.

"It's good to go through that process with him of finding the character's look. We were going to do many more scenes with the blonde wig but it was impossible. My hair is so dark to go to that colour that it started to fall out and my scalp started to peel because the product had to be so strong."

What did she do? "Wait. And pray."

Cruz welcomes the complexity and variety of Almodovar's films. "In All About My Mother I was a nun with Aids having a relationship with a transsexual. The first movie I did with him I was a whore giving birth in a bus. Every one has been good; that's the beauty of everything he writes. I can't say they're easy but they're well written and complex. That's a good thing for actresses."

She says their working relationship is very different. "On the set the relationship changes. Pedro's the director and I'm the actress. We don't gossip or talk about our things, but as soon as the shoot is finished, then we start hanging out again and going to the movies. It's a way to protect our working relationship and our friendship."

The films she does in America are not so different to her European projects, she says.

"I tend to choose more independent films than studio movies, though Nine is a huge movie, with an amazing screenplay, great characters and I've always wanted to do a musical. When you find one like that you feel very lucky. But I don't want to generalise. All the good directors are specific and unique.

"I particularly love working in Spain because that's my country and I love to work in my own language. There are many people there I respect and admire and it's also where I live. It's great that I can go and come back. I don't want to cut that. It doesn't even cross my mind. To combine both is great."

Lowdown

Who: Penelope Cruz
Born: April 28, 1974, Madrid, Spain
Key roles: Jamon, Jamon (1992), Belle Epoque (1992), Live Flesh (1997), The Hi-Lo Country (1998), All About My Mother (1999), Woman on Top (2000), All the Pretty Horses (2000), Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001), Vanilla Sky (2001), Head in the Clouds (2004), Sahara (2005), Volver (2007), Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008).
Latest: Broken Embraces and Nine starting on January 28