Penélope Cruz Sánchez (born 28 April 1974) is a Spanish actress. Prolific in Spanish and English-language films, her accolades include an Academy Award, BAFTA Award, a Grammy Award and three Goya Awards and a David di Donatello.
Cruz made her acting debut on television at age 16, and her feature film debut the following year in Jamón Jamón (1992). Her subsequent roles included Belle Époque (1992), Open Your Eyes (1997), Don Juan (1998), The Hi-Lo Country (1999), The Girl of Your Dreams (2000) and Woman on Top (2000). She has collaborated with Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar acting in seven films: Live Flesh (1997), All About My Mother (1999), Volver (2006), Broken Embraces (2009), I'm So Excited! (2013), Pain and Glory (2019), and Parallel Mothers (2021). In addition to acting, she has taken production duties in films such as Ma Ma (2015) and On the Fringe (2022).
For her role in Woody Allen's romantic drama Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Cruz won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She was Oscar-nominated for Volver (2006), Nine (2009), and Parallel Mothers (2021). Other films include Vanilla Sky (2001), Blow (2001), Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011), Murder on the Orient Express (2017), Everybody Knows (2018), Official Competition (2022), L'immensità (2022), Ferrari (2023), The Invite and La Bola Negra (both 2026). On television, she portrayed Donatella Versace in the FX miniseries The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (2018), for which she received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination.
Cruz has also modelled for Mango, Ralph Lauren and L'Oréal, and designed clothing for Mango with her younger sister Mónica Cruz. She has been a house ambassador for Chanel since 2018. She volunteered in Uganda and India, where she spent one week working with Mother Teresa, and donated her salary from The Hi-Lo Country to help fund the deceased nun's mission.
Early life
Cruz was born on 28 April 1974 in the town of Alcobendas, province of Madrid, Spain, to Encarna Sánchez, an Andalusian hairdresser and personal manager, and Eduardo Cruz, an Extremaduran retailer and car mechanic. She has two siblings, Mónica, also an actress, and Eduardo, a singer. She also has a paternal half-sister, Salma. She was raised Roman Catholic. Cruz grew up in Alcobendas, and spent long hours at her grandmother's apartment. She said she had a happy childhood. Cruz remembers "playing with some friends and being aware that I was acting as I was playing with them. I would think of a character and pretend to be someone else".
Initially, Cruz focused on dance: she studied classical ballet for nine years at Spain's National Conservatory. She took three years of Spanish ballet training and four years of theatre at Cristina Rota's school. She said that ballet instilled discipline that proved important in her acting career. When she became a cinephile at ten or eleven, her father bought a Betamax machine, which was then quite rare in her neighborhood.
As a teenager, Cruz became interested in acting after seeing the film Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990) by Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. She did casting calls for an agent but was rejected several times because the agent felt that she was too young. Cruz commented on the experience, "I was very extroverted as a kid.... I was studying when I was in high school at night, I was in ballet 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." In 1989, at the age of fifteen, Cruz won an audition at a talent agency at which more than 300 other girls had applied. In 1999, Katrina Bayonas, Cruz's agent, commented, "She was absolutely magic [at the audition]. It was obvious there was something... impressive about this kid.... She was... green, but there was a presence. There was just something coming from within."
Her father, Eduardo, died at his home in Spain in 2015, aged 62, from a heart attack.
Career
1989–1997: Early work
In 1989, 15-year-old Cruz made her acting debut in a music video for the Spanish pop group Mecano's song "La Fuerza del Destino". Between 1990 and 1991, she hosted the Spanish TV channel Telecinco's talk show La Quinta Marcha, a programme that was hosted by teenagers, aimed at a teenage audience. She also played in the "Elle et lui" episode of an erotic French TV series called Série rose in 1991, where she appeared nude. In 1991, Cruz made her feature film debut as the lead female role in the comedy drama art house film Jamón, jamón. In the film, she portrayed Silvia, a young woman who is expecting her first child with a man whose mother does not approve of the relationship and attempts to sabotage it by paying Javier Bardem's character to seduce her. People magazine noted that after Cruz appeared topless in the film, she became "a major sex symbol". In an interview with the Los Angeles Daily News in 1999, Cruz commented that "it was a great part, but...I wasn't really ready for the nudity. [...] But I have no regrets because I wanted to start working and it changed my life." Charlie Rose of 60 Minutes noted that Cruz "became an overnight sensation as much for her nude scenes as for her talent". When Rose asked Cruz if she was concerned about how she would be perceived after her role in the film, Cruz replied, "I just knew I had to do the complete opposite." Jamón, jamón received favorable reviews, with Chris Hicks of the Deseret News describing Cruz's portrayal of Silvia as "enchanting". Writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, film critic Roger Ebert wrote "it stars actors of considerable physical appeal, most particularly Penélope Cruz as Silvia". For her performance, Cruz was nominated for a Spanish Actors Union Newcomer Award and a Goya Award for Best Actress. The same year she appeared in the Academy Award-winning Belle Époque as the virginal Luz. People magazine noted that Cruz's role as Luz showed that she was versatile.
From 1993 to 1996, Cruz appeared in ten Spanish and Italian films. At 20, she went to live in New York for two years at Christopher and Greenwich to study ballet and English between films. She recalls learning English "kind of late", previously knowing only the dialogue she had learned for the casting and the phrases "How are you?" and "Thank you".
In 1997, Cruz appeared in the Spanish comedy film Love Can Seriously Damage Your Health. She portrays Diana, a fan of the Beatles band member John Lennon; she tries unsuccessfully to meet him. Years later, after many failed relationships, Diana re-unites with an acquaintance under unusual circumstances. That same year, she appeared in the opening scene of Pedro Almodóvar's Live Flesh as a prostitute who gives birth on a bus and in Et hjørne af paradis (A Corner of Paradise) as Doña Helena. Cruz's final appearance in 1997 was the Amenabar-directed Spanish sci-fi drama, "Abre Los Ojos"/ Open Your Eyes. She plays Sofia, the love interest of Eduardo Noriega's lead character. Open Your Eyes received positive reviews, and was later remade by U.S. director Cameron Crowe as "Vanilla Sky" (who cast Cruz in the same role and Tom Cruise in Noriega's role), but "Open Your Eyes" was not commercially successful. Kevin N. Laforest of the Montreal Film Journal commented in his September 2002 review that Cruz "has been getting some really bad reviews for her recent American work, but I personally think that she's a more than decent actress, especially here, where she's charming, moving and always believable. [...] There's one shot in particular, where Cruz enters a room in a greenish glow, which is right out of Hitchcock's picture [Vertigo]."
1998–2000: Early American film roles
In 1998, Cruz appeared in her first American film as Billy Crudup's consolation-prize Mexican girlfriend in Stephen Frears' western film The Hi-Lo Country. Cruz stated that she had difficulties understanding people speaking English…