Penelope Cruz graces the cover of the June 2011 issue of Vogue magazine where she is shot by Peruvian fashion photographer Mario Testino and interview by writer Jason Gay in which she shares her humble Hollywood beginnings and her dreams to work with Johnny Depp to who he now says of Cruz "she’s Ricky to my Lucy".
There are oddities that make sense only in Los Angeles—canary-yellow Rolls-Royces, lasagna cupcakes, agents. The Hollywood Walk of Fame is another. Here is a boulevard where Meryl Streep shares the glory with Erik Estrada; where Audrey Hepburn earns the same real estate as Rin Tin Tin; where a Spider-Man impersonator once socked a Charlie Chaplin impersonator in the face. The Walk is America’s most accessible shrine to show-business fantasy: If you dream big enough, one day your name could be commemorated on this hallowed ground in gold letters. And then a sunburned dude with a green parrot on his shoulder will roller-skate right over it.
It’s a warm Friday in April when the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce awards its 2,436th star to Penélope Cruz. She is a woman who, growing up in Spain, saw a photo of a bedazzled Michael Jackson kneeling before his red-carpeted star and never imagined she would one day do the same. “It sounded like science fiction,” she says, her famous inflection deliciously animating the term. When Cruz first moved to Los Angeles, she spoke little English and lived in a tiny hotel room she shared only with cats. Cats, plural. “I was very lonely,” she says. “I would find cats in the street and take them with me. I raised a lot of cats in that period.”
The cats all found nice homes, Cruz assures me in a way that recalls those end-of-film disclaimers (no animals were harmed during the making of Penélope Cruz). In the years since, Cruz, too, has found a more comfortable place in America, evolving from a misused ornament in Hollywood movies to one of the most celebrated actresses of her generation, a multilingual Oscar winner and muse to giants like Pedro Almodóvar and Woody Allen. Today her home—whether in Los Angeles, New York, or Madrid—is shared with her new husband, the acclaimed Spanish actor, fellow Oscar winner, and occasional on-screen lover Javier Bardem. A couple of months ago, there was a tender new addition: a son, Leonardo, the couple’s first child.
It has been a staggering journey. “I don’t think people realize the barriers Penélope’s broken,” says Rob Marshall, who directed Cruz in 2009’s Nine as well as the brand-new Pirates of the Caribbean installment, On Stranger Tides, in which she joins the misadventures of Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow. “There is really no one like her.”
This is why we’re here, why Cruz is getting a star amid an eight-deep crowd of fans in front of the El Capitan theater, waving old magazine covers. Cruz steps out into the sun. Sheathed in a violet L’Wren Scott dress and wearing tall black Louboutins, she is, as always, a burst of smoky-eyed beauty. Her brown hair plunges over her shoulders in the way hair does only for cartoon mermaids. The crowd erupts. Bardem slips by in sunglasses and a navy blazer, barely noticed.
After some laudatory words from Marshall, it’s time for Captain Sparrow, Johnny Depp. He looks so eccentrically Depp, it’s as if he’s fresh from posing at Madame Tussaud’s: tattered brown fedora, violet aviator glasses, scarf, flannel shirt, and baggy carpenter’s jeans with two black pens tucked into the pocket of the right leg. “A relatively long time ago, we did Blow together,” Depp cracks, letting the double entendre linger. It’s a reference to his first movie with Cruz, released a decade ago, about the cocaine kingpin George Jung. The two actors have stayed close friends. Cruz refers to Depp as “The Man with the Hat.” Depp calls her “this curious Spanish creature.”
“A lot of things can be said about this creature Penélope Cruz,” Depp says. “None of them are bad.” He calls her a “one-off,” “magnificent,” and “magical.”
“She’s the dysfunctional Bacall to my twisted Bogart,” Depp continues. “She’s the otherworldly Scarlett to my clueless Rhett. She’s the. . . .” He pauses. “Well, she’s Ricky to my Lucy.”
For more on the beauty and being that is Penelope Cruz scoot on over to vogue.com for the full story.
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