Cruz Control
We could say this “Spanish enchantress” won worldwide fame simply on the strength of her drop-dead gorgeous looks. But that wouldn’t be P.C. By Haley Longman
A
super acting chops, she surely dispelled it in 2007’s The Good Night, playing two contrasting characters whose differences she “expertly mined,” as one reviewer put it. Other notable movies included 2009’s Nine, 2016’s Zoolander 2 and the 2008 Woody Allen film Vicky Cristina Barcelona. In that one Cruz, playing a mentally and emotionally unstable wife, made history by becoming the first Spanish woman to ever win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. This gifted 45-year-old thespian is no slacker when it comes to fashion either. She has served as the spokesperson for L ’Oréal and Lancôme, a model for Ralph Lauren and Mango, and a co-designer with her sister Mónica for a line of Agent Provocateur lingerie and Loewe handbags. Currently she’s the ambassador for Chanel and the face of its aptly titled 2019 Cruise campaign, shot by the late artist-photographer and Chanel creative director Karl Lagerfeld himself. Cruz has always admired the French fashion house. She attended her first Chanel show in 1999 and chose Lagerfeld’s designs to wear to the Cannes Film Festival, the Oscars and, most recently, the 2018 Emmys, for which she donned a custom Cinderella-blue gown made of tulle, beads and feathers that took more than 280 hours to embroider by hand. Cruz also has the luxury to combine her love of fashion with her acting, portraying Donatella Versace in the FX miniseries American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, for which she nabbed that aforementioned Emmy nomination. As for her relatively private personal life? Cruz and her fellow Oscar winner and frequent co-star Bardem—the two starred as drug lord Pablo Escobar and his mistress in Loving Pablo in 2017—have been married since 2010 and are parents to son Leo and daughter Luna. Do their kids have big shoes to fill? Damn right. Will Chanel lend them a few pairs? We’re sure of it.
A Chanel ambassador is nothing on the red carpet without complementary jewels. The activist has her own line of fine jewelry with Swarovski, Atelier Swarovski by Penélope Cruz, made exclusively with responsibly sourced materials.
SPRING/SUMMER 2019
ctress Penélope Cruz is a renowned and versatile international star—let’s get that settled right away. She’s an Oscar winner, an Emmy nominee, a designer of jewelry and accessories, and the newest ambassador for the fashion house Chanel. Much of this may seem to have been foreordained, given that nature has made her so stunning to look at that “beautiful” risks understatement. In fact, success wasn’t automatic—but it wasn’t slow either. Cruz grew up in the city of Alcobendas, about eight miles north of Madrid in central Spain, a child of a hairdresser mom and a mechanicretailer dad. She studied classical ballet well into her teen years and— having always loved performing—was bitten by the acting bug at age 14 when she saw the movie Tie Me Up!, Tie Me Down! by up-and-coming Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. After booking an agent at age 15, she did a small cameo appearance as a dancer in a Spanish pop-music video. Her first “real” gig was as a host for a Spanish TV show for teens. At 18 she landed her first leading role in the Spanish film Jamón Jamón with future husband Javier Bardem. Cruz went topless for her role as a pregnant woman seduced by Bardem’s underwear model, and the film instantly skyrocketed her (and, fine, him too) into “sex symbol” status. But it soon became apparent that there was more to Cruz than her curves. She moved to Hollywood in 1994 and by 2001 was big-time, starring as a cocaine addict alongside Johnny Depp in Blow and as Tom Cruise’s lover in Vanilla Sky. (The latter role led to a three-year real-life relationship that must have entailed a lot of spelling confusion.) Then came 2006’s Volver, directed by her old-friend-turned-mentor Almodóvar, in which New York Times critic A.O. Scott said, “She manages to be earthy, unpretentious and a little vulgar without shedding an ounce of her natural glamour.” If there was any doubt left that this stunner had
| 55 TSG.ss19.muse.indd 55
3/6/19 1:38 PM