Earlier this year, Cruz became the first Spanish-born actress to win an Oscar when she was named best supporting actress for her role in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona. This fall, she'll star in two new films, Broken Embraces, her fourth film with director Pedro Almodóvar, and Rob Marshall's musical Nine, but Vanity Fair takes a look back at her career and reveals that if several directors hadn't realized her potential, she may have never found success in Hollywood.

There are only a handful of actresses who have started their careers in a non-English speaking country and gone on to become A-list actresses, such as Marlene Dietrich, Sophia Loren, and Ingrid Bergman, but Sischy writes:

Like some of those actresses, Cruz isn't cookie-cutter pretty-she even has a bit of a schnoz-but her unusual features come together in a memorable aria of real beauty.

We really can't see any imperfections in Cruz, and Woody Allen seems to agree, saying:

"I don't like to look at Penélope directly. It is too overwhelming."

Almodóvar says the reason Cruz's career got off to a rocky start with films like Vanilla Sky, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Gothika, and other films that were not considered commercial successes is that other people in Hollywood couldn't see past her beauty:

"It was bad luck for Penélope, because some of the movies were very ambitious, but this happens. They only saw her as a beautiful girl. It is the problem with the market, the agents, the studios, the film industry as a whole that labels actors in a way that is not very subtle at all. The problem is that it happened with 10 or 12 movies for Penélope, and it could have been the end." Then he laughed: "But I was there to save her. I'm joking now."

Penélope, who grew up outside of Madrid, was inspired to become an actress by watching Almodóvar's films as a teenager. Seeing his film Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! changed her life. She explains:

"That was the day I decided to be an actress," Cruz says. "I fell in love. I'd found what I wanted to do. I really didn't want to have to be in an office. I was a good student, but not happy. I thought, I have nobody in my family and no friends who can make a living out of anything related to an artistic profession, but I want to try. I decided to look for an agent."

Later, after she'd acted in a string of somewhat successful American films and become known as a celebrity, but not a great actress, Almodóvar's 2006 film Volver relaunched her career.

Penélope was born to be an actress," says Almodóvar... "She is someone who is extremely emotional, and if she was not an actress it could be a problem for her. It's luck she has chosen a profession that allows her to express something that would be too much for a normal person. Otherwise she would suffer a lot. And even now maybe she suffers too much." Apparently this tendency goes way back. "I've always been a worrier," says Cruz. "Since I was a little girl I've always felt that if I had a moment of peace I'd wonder: Are you sure you can afford to feel like this?"

Of course, she still refuses to discuss her emotions concerning one area of her life: her relationship with Javier Bardem. She refuses to discuss the persistant rumors that the two are expecting a child. Sischy seems to see it as a triumph that she gets Cruz to let this one little detail slip, writing;

I brought up a U2 concert that she and Bardem had attended in Paris, mentioning that I'd heard she was playing air guitar during some of the songs. She squealed with delight, saying, "Javier is even better at air guitar!"

The Passions Of Penelope [Vanity Fair]
OMG! Penelope Cruz Feeds Pregnancy Reports; Visits The Ob-Gyn Clinic [N.Y. Daily News]

Wall Street Journal:

American girls abroad — it's a subject that has provided rich material for writers from Henry James to Edith Wharton, from Louisa May Alcott to Cornelia Otis Skinner to Laurie Colwin. Now, in the beautiful if insubstantial pastel "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," it's Woody Allen's turn as he chronicles the sentimental education of two young women on a summer idyll in Barcelona.

Entertainment Weekly:

I hope it's not too bourgeois of me to point out that for a director who is trying to make a worldly romantic comedy, this is quite a shallow and jejune point of view. (It's why the '60s had to end.) Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a movie of distinct pleasures, a number of them of the travel-and-leisure variety (never mind all that wondrous, dripped-candle Gaudí architecture — what's really fabulous is the long lunches in which people linger over wine). The writing is zippy, the story spins like a top, and Bardem turns out to be the wittiest of leading men, making Juan Antonio a seducer who is almost innocent in his games. As for Hall and Johansson, both of them have lovely presences, yet Vicky and Cristina, as characters, never quite transcend the schematic. They are mind and body, spirit and flesh, strait-laced and free. In Woody Allen's perpetual counterculture, never the twain shall meet.

New York Times:

Maria Elena and Juan Antonio give the film such a twinned jolt of energy that you may wish it would head off into Almodóvar country, but that wouldn’t be true to Mr. Allen, for whom desire remains an agony. Still, he’s enough of an entertainer to give the audience its pleasures, which partly accounts for Ms. Johansson. She isn’t much of an actress, but it doesn’t terribly matter in his films: She gives him succulent youth, and he cushions her with enough laughs to distract you from her lack of skill. The appealing Ms. Hall, whose jaw line and brittle delivery evoke Katharine Hepburn, furnishes an actual performance, one that, tinged with sadness, makes evident that this is as much a tragedy as a comedy.

USA Today:

A witty, engrossing and well-crafted musing on the capricious nature of love, the film also is a valentine to the city, which is almost an additional character. Its visual splendors are displayed in a sun-dappled light with special regard for its striking art and architecture, particularly the work of Antoni Gaudi. Allen seems to have been reinvigorated since he began filming in Europe.

Washington Post:

"Vicky Cristina Barcelona" is different because it's really about Vicky and Cristina, and Juan Antonio and Maria Elena. This time Allen's philosophical musings emerge subtly from the interaction of these characters and their choices instead of through trademark dialogue. Though he relies too much on the curt observations of an omniscient narrator, the movie still feels more casual, more painterly, more about great characters than the invocation of Freud or Balzac or Ernest Becker. Through these characters and the natural performances, and without worrying about landing punch lines or wringing hands, Allen lets the movie unfurl toward a sublime conclusion and final shot, the kind that makes you sigh with gratitude (or relief) that he's in firm control of this phase of his career.

New York Sun:

Despite an awkward, third-party narration in an academic male voice (belonging to Christopher Evan Welch) that analyzes the characters as if they were test subjects in an anthropology experiment, the film may be the least abstract of Mr. Allen's more recent efforts, and the least yoked to the filmmaker's signature affectations. Perhaps, in all its talky inconclusiveness and postcard vistas, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" is not very different from one of the more trivial Eric Rohmer comedies, all about the eye candy and some vaguely risqué business regarding the rules of attraction. But in its best moments, when Mr. Bardem and Ms. Cruz lay siege to the screen, reveling in their fever-bed chemistry, it's as if Mr. Allen has stumbled into an alternate universe — one where his movies are actually worth watching again.

NPR:

No matter what you end up thinking about Vicky Cristina Barcelona, it's hard not be entertained by the Oscar-winning Bardem, who eats this role up like it's a hot fudge sundae. In fact, Bardem and Penelope Cruz, who plays his ex-wife, are so good they make the film seem better than it is.

The problem is that Vicky Cristina Barcelona is too intent on being taken seriously to end up being more than mildly diverting. Allen himself has said in interviews that this was a film about relationships, not a comedy — and he's right.

The New York Observer:

There are no easy answers for either Vicky or Cristina even in voluptuous Barcelona; the city serves extensively as the film’s fourth muse, making for delectable summer entertainment in time-honored travelogue fashion. But there is much more as well in the seriocomic intensity with which Woody contemplates his three contrasting goddesses of desire, and their assorted womanly impasses and vulnerabilities. I hope this film will confound his army of naysayers by becoming a huge commercial success. It is already an artistic triumph of heroic dimensions, considering that it has come much closer to the end of a career than its beginning. The magnificent acting ensemble alone is worth the price of admission.

Time:

Whenever Bardem or Cruz are on screen, VCB finds its heart. It sees them as fully in tune with their feelings: totally willing, and why not?, to act on impulses they've learned to trust. The Americans are children by comparison, a little stiff, so conditioned to overanalyzing every attraction that they would lose the moment — if only there weren't a Don Juan Antonio to send seismic shivers up their consciences.

Village Voice:

A whirling vortex of jealousy, passion, and lust, spewing her words in a melodic rush of English and Spanish, Maria Elena is at once too much to handle and the closest Vicky Cristina Barcelona comes to offering up its vision of the ideal woman. (And yes—ironically or not—she's also the one most likely to put a knife in you.) Surely, this will prompt the cultural guardians who remain unwilling to parse Allen the filmmaker from Allen the public figure to condemn Vicky Cristina Barcelona as an untenable defense of loose morals and male piggishness. But I for one found something oddly elating in the movie's conviction that it is better to have made passionate love and maybe almost died at the hands of a jealous mistress than never to have loved at all. To quote Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians: "Enjoy yourself. It's later than you think."

The New Yorker:

The way the women play against Bardem is fascinating. Rebecca Hall, a twenty-six-year-old English actress from a theatrical family (her father is the director Peter Hall), is tall, with a long face and a wide smile—she can look radiant one minute and neurotic, tense, and gloomy the next, as if she were channelling Allen’s stumbling anxieties (a common reaction in actors working with him for the first time). With Bardem, Hall goes back and forth between desire and panic, and she’s touching as none of Allen’s other female characters have been recently. Scarlett Johansson, who is still only twenty-three, has appeared in an amazing number of movies. There’s no mystery why: she’s charming and also pliant and openly sexual in a way that obviously pleases male directors. She’s at a stage in which her sensuality is more developed than anything else in her personality, but that configuration works for her this time. Going to bed with an attractive man is not going to tell Cristina all that she needs to know about herself. Allen has successfully captured a spirit of restless indeterminacy. Does Cristina have any artistic gifts? Before the summer is over, she begins to stir.

PS: For all you Allen-fiends out there, check out this short documentary about Woody Allen by Jean-Luc Godard. [via Videogum]

'Vicky Cristina Barcelona' opens today in wide release.