Penelope Cruz: Euro Star

Take a good look at the woman in the picture at left. Gaze into those brown UFO eyes, get a load of that Roman nose and those flaring lips, features that have been memorized by a global audience via Spanish films like Pedro Almodóvar’s Live Flesh and All About My Mother, and Hollywood outings like Woman on Top and All the Pretty Horses. Now let us convince you that Penélope Cruz is (and this is the part that will throw you) average.

Yes, average. As unsurprising as a jug of sangria on a summer’s day or a teeming dance floor in Ibiza. An average 26-year-old European. Cruz began her globe-trotting as an adolescent. “I knew I was going to be a dancer or an actress,” she says. “I knew I wasn’t going to be staying in the same place every day because I would go crazy.” Like a lot of Europeans of her generation Cruz is on the move, leaving her homeland to further her career but retaining a strong connection to her Spanish roots. Cruz identifies Spain as her home — she’s one of three children of a hairdresser mama and a retailer papa and grew up in Madrid — but she calls herself a “citizen of the world.”

She shows no interest in politics and instead lends her energy to charity work in Calcutta. Professionally, she has toiled in Spain, Italy, France as well as the U.S., explaining casually in flamenco-flavored English that “I like to work in different languages.” When traveling, she picks up her Spanish newspapers on the Web. She’s highly paid but not devoted to wealth; this summer she’ll begin a five-month hiatus when she’ll rollerblade and study photography. In short, a typical 20-something European. Responding to questions from a Time poll measuring the mood of these peripatetic adventurers, she says globalization “gives me the opportunity to work.”

Cruz is now the most in-demand ingenue in movies. With more than two dozen European and American films to her credit, she will, in the coming months, star in Blow as Johnny Depp’s cocaine-addled wife, in the World War II romantic drama Captain Corelli’s Mandolin opposite Nicolas Cage and in Vanilla Sky, directed by Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous) and co-starring Tom Cruise. That film is a remake of the 1997 Spanish psychological thriller Abre los Ojos, which also starred Cruz (she’s reprising her original role) and proves that despite her success you don’t have to look far to see the actor’s roots.

Wanderlust and energy propelled Cruz to her current success. “I was dancing every day,” says Cruz, who’s seated in a makeup chair and being groomed by hair and cosmetic artists for a Ralph Lauren ad campaign. Here in a Los Angeles photography studio, she’s wearing a red silk robe, with her knees gathered to her chest. “I was always studying dance, like three or four hours every night. We used to have bleeding feet, but they were so tough, the teachers. You’d say, ‘Excuse me, I’m bleeding.’ They’d say, ‘Smile!’ ” She later took the same dedication to acting classes and signed with an agent at age 14. “She was still pretty green as an actress,” says Katrina Bayonas, who discovered Cruz in Madrid and now acts as her manager, “but she had great commitment and was studying her ass off.”

Cruz’s physical assets and flirty, spitfire, confident acting in the 1992 Spanish sex comedy Jamón Jamón made her a star and a sex symbol. “That was an explosion in my country,” says Cruz, who was 17 when the film was released. “My life became totally different.” But some things never change. Even after Belle Epoque and All About My Mother (both won Oscars in the Best Foreign Film category) brought American producers and directors courting, she always knew that “I wasn’t done with Spain.” With Vanilla Sky completed, she’ll return to her birthplace to make her next movie. Cruz explains: “My home’s still in Madrid. I love the way people take time for themselves. They work hard. But they have time for their friends and time for silence and for fun.”

Spain also provides a retreat from the American tabloids, which have speculated wildly on Cruz’s romantic exploits. She has denied dating Matt Damon, her co-star in All the Pretty Horses. More recently, she has been linked to Cage, though she says they’re simply “very good friends.” Cruz says that at the moment she’s not dating and that “I never talk about those things. There’s a part that you have to save for yourself.”

Cruz is still in the chair as the makeup artist puts on the finishing touches. Before the reporter leaves, he apologizes for pushing her on questions of romance. “Everyone who asks, they apologize,” says Cruz dryly. Photographer Herb Ritts is waiting outside to take her picture and sell Ralph Lauren to unsuspecting mortals foolish enough to believe that evening wear can turn anyone into a Spanish enchantress. “She’s very spirited and loves to move,” says Ritts. “I took her picture out in the desert. I told her to take off running and that’s when she felt most at home. She wants to get out of the gate.” Not unlike a lot of other Europeans of her generation.