Penélope Cruz has been on the rooftop of a
Riviera hotel for hours, meeting and greet-
ing, ever since she flew into Cannes from her
home in Madrid this morning. The famous
film festival that’s staged here, for all its out-
ward glamour and yacht-y flash, demands
one main thing of those film stars who
attend: relentless, marathon glad-handing.
Cruz, who at 45 has more than 70 cinematic
credits to her name, is well accustomed to
the peculiarities of the place. Dressed in a
crisp jacket and skirt, behind oversized
shades, she moves coolly under the sun canopies
and between billowing white-linen screens,
giving charming pocket interviews to the European press in her two,
three, four fluent languages.
Puffer-jacketed waiters criss-cross the roof. Eight storeys below, on
the seafront road, a queue of blacked-out Renaults chug by, ferrying
around the celebrated. French police armed with giant assault rifles
politely ask the tourists not to jaywalk. On the beach, where parquet
dance floors have been laid out over the sand, the early evening discos
are starting up. Europop drifts up towards the roof, where a French
broadcaster has arrived, wearing an immaculate dinner suit, to meet
Cruz. He bows and, speaking to the floor
about a foot in front of her red-painted toe-
nails, says: ‘This is a great... great honour.’
Cannes is like this, a confection of the glamorous,
the arduous and the frankly ridiculous. Cruz
will be here for just over 48 hours.
The first time she came to Cannes, two
decades ago, Cruz tells me, ‘My priorities were
different. I was here. I was enjoying every
second. I didn’t want to miss a thing. I still
value being here, with a film I love, but it’s a
different energy.’
Since 2010, she has been married to the
Spanish actor Javier Bardem, who like Cruz is
an Oscar winner. (She got hers in 2009 for her
performance in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina
Barcelona. Bardem’s statue had come the year before, following his
sinister turn in the Coen brothers’ No Country For Old Men.) Cruz and
Bardem have two children, eight-year-old Leo and five-year-old Luna,
and live in a cooly metropolitan suburb north of Madrid. Whatever
Cruz does here in Cannes, whether it’s walk the red carpet, sign head-
shots, or charm strangers on a sunny roof, she admits that a part of her
brain is always at home with the kids.
‘Everywhere, everywhere, in everything you do. Because they are the
most important thing that you’ll do in your life, the most wonderful
challenge, the biggest responsibility you can have.’ And she’s also won-
dering if she’ll get to bed tonight by 10pm, as is her habit at home. ‘It’s
work here. I do my work and then,’ she laughs, a rich, unselfconscious
chortle, ‘be-e-e-ed!’
Not long before this, a young male waiter was dispatched to bring her
some olives. He has the olives now, a vast bowl the size of a crash helmet,
but no Cruz to present them to. When the waiter finally intercepts her,
she’s on the move, working the roof, and he slightly loses his head – just
as many young men have long been losing their heads in front of her,
ever since she first emerged as a star in the Nineties, a muse to directors
such as Woody Allen and Pedro Almódovar, an inspiration to designers
like Karl Lagerfeld, a pile of leading men (Tom Cruise, Matt Damon,
Matthew McConaughey) left in her wake as ex-boyfriends. The panickedwaiter thrusts the whole big bowl at Cruz, and still moving, but not
wanting to embarrass the kid, she simply accepts them as luggage. Cruz
prongs an olive in and nods at him – yum – before turning a corner and
discreetly passing the bowl to an assistant.
Cruz is in Cannes with friends she’s known for years, including
Almódovar. Tomorrow, they’ll premiere his new film Pain and Glory at
the Palais des Festivals on the seafront. This is the sixth time Cruz has
been cast by Almódovar, their history together stretching back to the
very start of her career. She has said, many times, that if it wasn’t for
watching his 1989 film Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! as a young girl, she
might not have become an actress.
The new film is a touching contemporary drama about the ways in
which we look back on, and sometimes misread, the past. In scene-
stealing flashbacks Cruz plays a working-class mother, who, despite the
best intentions, will end up disappointing her son. Well, shrugs Cruz,
it’s the great fear of every parent, isn’t it? ‘You want to do things right all
the time, but nobody does things right all the time, and you have to
make peace with that. The responsibility of it! This idea that whatever
you do in the first few years with your kids, that lasts.’
Coincidentally, amid all the festival-goers on the hotel roof, there’s
a mother with a baby boy. The child seems a little startled by the hub-
bub and every time Cruz goes by him she cannot help ducking in to
touch his cheek, or to converse excitedly in baby-talk (add a fifth
fluent language to her list.) At one point she
asks permission from the mother and lifts the
boy on to her knee. He gapes at Cruz, I
swear, with the same dizzy awe as the waiter
with the olives. Afterwards, I chat to the baby’s
mother. ‘I guess that’s the effect of a star,’ she
says. ‘That’s how it is with stars. That’s why
they are stars.’
The next day it’s cooler, cloudier. When
Cruz sits down to chat it’s lunchtime, a rare
moment out of the festival clamour. We’re in a
spot that looks out over the choppy sea and
Cruz wears a graphic-printed, cotton mini-
dress that isn’t quite warm enough. She has a
camel-coloured scarf about her shoulders that
hangs to her knees, shrouding her like a blanket.
She talks easily, informally, gesturing a lot, tilting her head, pursing her
lips, interrupting herself every so often to check the (as-a-rule perfect)
pronunciation of certain English words.
I have read many thousands of words about Cruz, and her physical
beauty is exhaustively documented: the chocolate-drop eyes, the flaw-
less complexion, and so on. What tends to get only secondary mention,
if any, is the liveliness of her mind. Did she always know she was smart?
‘I mean, I always did well at school, with not a lot of effort,’ Cruz
says. ‘I was a responsible student. I was alert, I would listen.’
What about her knack for languages? You can tell she’s a linguist
because she cares about her stresses, sometimes lingering on multi-
syllable words, rolling them around her mouth to get the sound right.
She says they came piecemeal, from school, from travel, from jobs.
She started to learn French at primary school, when she was growing up
in a suburb of Madrid, the eldest of three children to Eduardo (who
worked in a hardware shop) and Encarna (who ran a hair and beauty
salon). She began to get a grip on English in her late teens, once she’d
already started to make a name for herself in Spain and had decided to
move, aged 19, to the US; a dual-track career, working in both Europe
and in Hollywood, has kept her busily employed for more than a
quarter of a century. She learned Italian at the end of her twenties, in
2003, while making a film called Don’t Move – she’d been cast as an ]Tatler August 2019 tatler.com‘Everything isout of proportionin this job. Youhave to have adistance, from thegood things andthe bad things,to survive’08-19COVERSTORY.indd 60 03/06/2019 10:00
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