Penelope Cruz

Biography of Penelope Cruz

Penélope Cruz was born on April 28, 1974 in Alcobendas, Madrid.

She is the eldest of the three children of Encarna Sánchez, a hairdresser, and Eduardo Cruz, a commercial agent and car mechanic. Her brother Eduardo is a singer and her sister Mónica was a dancer in the company of Joaquín Cortés.

She has that name (Penélope) because of a song by Joan Manuel Serrat, the favorite of her parents. She was raised Catholic and spent a lot of time at her grandmother's house.

She studied ten years of classical ballet, three of Spanish ballet and four of interpretation at the Cristina Rota school.

In her early days, she participated in television: Crónicas Urbanas by Ricardo Palacios, Ella y el de Jaime Chávarri, Framed with Timothy Dalton and La 5ª Marcha, on Tele 5, and in a video by the composer Nacho Cano, a former member of the group Mecano.

Among the films for which she was proposed and that she did not do are Kika, for being too young for the character that Verónica Forqué finally played, and Walking With the Clouds, which finally starred Aitana Sánchez Gijón .

She would later shoot films such as Jamón Jamón, by Bigas Luna, the Oscar-winning Belle Époque by FernandoTrueba and La Niña de Tus Ojos by the same director. After her debut in English with 'Hi-lo country' in 1998, her premieres in Hollywood were continuous, earning the respect of the industry with works such as 'All the pretty horses' or 'Woman on top'.

She became a vegetarian after filming All The Pretty Horses in 2000.

Rumors circulated in Los Angeles art circles that she may have been the cause of the split between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. The actress worked with Cruise on the set of Vanilla Sky, a version of the Spanish film Abre los ojos. Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz amicably ended their relationship in late January 2004.

In 2005 Penelope was romantically involved with actor Matthew McConaughey, whom she met on the set of Sahara, an adventure film that won first place in theaters in the United States.

She was directed by Pedro Almodóvar in Volver (2006), a film for which she won the award for best female performance at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. On January 23, 2007, and with the same film, she became the first Spanish actress in history to be nominated for an Oscar for best actress. On January 28, 2007, she won her second Goya.

In 2008 she became the first Spanish actress to win an Oscar for best female performance thanks to the film Vicky Cristina Barcelona directed by Woody Allen. Thanks to this film she also won the BAFTA award and her third Goya, being nominated for the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild.

In 2010 she appears in Sex and the City 2, and in 2011 she worked again with Woody Allen in To Rome with Love.

During 2014, directed by Julio Médem, she shot Ma Ma, and directed by Louis Leterrier, Grimsby. In 2016 she released Zoolander 2, in which she worked with Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller. She starred in The Queen of Spain, again directed by Fernando Trueba, reprising the role of The Girl with Your Eyes.

In 2017, she had a prominent role in Kenneth Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express, opposite Judi Dench, Johnny Depp, Willem Dafoe and Michelle Pfeiffer.

In 2019, she played Jacinta in the film Pain and Glory, directed by Pedro Almodóvar, and played the role of Olga Salanueva-González in La red avispa.

In 2021, she starred with Antonio Banderas in the film Official Competition and returns to premiere with Almodóvar co-starring in the film Madres Paralelas.

In 2022 she acts in the female-led action movie The 355.

She volunteered in Uganda for two months in 1998, and the following year, she donated her entire salary from The Hi-Lo Country to Mother Teresa's Children's Shrine in Calcutta.

She was paired with Spanish actor Javier Bardem who was a co-star in the movie Jamón, Jamón.

Penélope Cruz, she gave birth to a baby late on January 22, 2011 at the Cedars Sinai clinic in Los Angeles (United States), frequented by billionaire Hollywood stars. The parents opted for Los Angeles and not Madrid, so that the child would have dual nationality.

The couple married in July 2010 in a secret ceremony in the Bahamas.

Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem had their second child, a girl, at the Ruber Internacional Hospital in Madrid on July 22, 2013.