She's had a 10-year flirtation with Tinseltown, but Penelope Cruz is back where her heart is in Almodóvar's new movie, she tells Simon Hattenstone
Seven years ago, Pedro Almodóvar told Penelope Cruz he had the perfect role for her. He was planning to write a film about a woman married to an abusive loser who molests their teenage daughter. Almodóvar told her that, even though she was in her mid-20s, she was made to play the daughter. He then put the project to one side. In between times he made a series of wonderful movies that established him as one of the world's great film-makers, while Cruz became the first Spanish actress to conquer Hollywood, made a series of disappointing films and had a famous relationship with Tom Cruise before appearing to settle down to life in Los Angeles with actor Matthew McConaughey.
Last year, Almodóvar got back in touch with Cruz to say he had the perfect role for her. He had finally written the screenplay about a woman married to an abusive loser who molests their daughter, and Cruz was made to play the mother. As so often with Almodóvar, she couldn't believe what he was proposing. After all, Cruz is only 32, and could easily pass as 22. And it does take some believing the first time you see Cruz on screen as Raimunda, the sexy, tough, mendacious, vulnerable, melodramatic mamma. But by the end of the film, Volver, she has given the performance of her life.
Cruz calls the part a coming-of-age gift, and says it is the first time she has been allowed to play a real woman. Which is appropriate because, she says, for the first time in her life she feels like a woman rather than a girl.
It's a long time since the camera has made love to its star with such abandon. Almodóvar tracks longingly down her cleavage as she does the washing-up, stalks her padded-out bottom as she struts through town, flirts with her lips as she talks.
The film is a raging love letter to Cruz. Almodóvar, who is gay, sounds as if he's on the turn when describing Cruz. ("Those eyes, her neck, her shoulders, her breasts! Penelope has got one of the most spectacular cleavages in world cinema. Looking at her has been one of the great pleasures of the shoot," he writes lubriciously in his notes to Volver.) We meet in Cannes, where Volver opened the festival to brilliant reviews but was beaten to the Palme d'Or by Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley. It's a blindingly sunny day and Cruz wanders over, her understated elegance (jeans, flesh-coloured Dolce jacket) set off by Louis Vuitton superstar shades. When she takes off the glasses you realise how exceptionally beautiful she is. In a way, her face doesn't make sense. Her exaggerated features - huge brown eyes, great gash of mouth, long slope of nose - sit in a tiny head. She could be a cartoon character, and yet at the same time there is great delicacy to her beauty. She wears no make-up, and looks all the better for it.
She smiles when I mention Almodó-var's adoration, and says, yes, it is a love affair of sorts.
"You don't have to have sex involved in a love story for it to be a love story," she says. "When I'm at the end of my life, thinking about the most important people in my life, people I have loved the most, Pedro will be one of the main people."
It's six years since she and Almodóvar last made a film together. Over the past decade, Cruz has largely made Hollywood or US-backed movies, providing exotic love interest - she is Nicolas Cage's Greek sweetheart in Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Tom Cruise's girlfriend in Vanilla Sky and Johnny Depp's coke-addled lady friend in Blow. Almodóvar says she has become "stylised" in the US; he believes Volver shows "she has more force in plebeian characters than in very refined ones".
Cruz made her movie debut in Bigas Luna's mad-cow movie, Jamón Jamón 14 years ago. It was a typically Spanish affair: surreal, dark, erotic, bonkers. She then worked with Almodóvar on Live Flesh and All About My Mother. Cruz was perfect for Almodóvar, with her unlikely beauty and dazzling contradictions, seguing from Mother Teresa to voracious sexual predator, sometimes within the one scene. She could play restrained naturalism one second, then crazy melodrama the next - just what he needed for films that took the most unfeasible stories and somehow made them first believable, then unbearably moving. In Live Flesh, she played a prostitute who goes into labour and gives birth on a bus. In All About My Mother, she is a nun who has been impregnated by a transvestite and is dying of Aids. When Almodóvar described the latter part to her, she thought it was ridiculous.
"I said to him, 'I have no idea how I am going to make this believable'. And he said, 'You just have to trust me', and he was right."
As I talk to Cruz, I begin to realise why she can make these outrageous narratives work. She belongs to Almodóvar's world of ghosts, coincidence, superstition and sexual ambiguity. In fact, she says that is the appeal of working with Almodóvar. "I spent a lot of nights with my trailer full of transsexuals, and they told me stories about their life, how they had suffered a lot, trying to find their truth," she says. "Some were working as prostitutes, others had normal jobs. I got along with all of them."
When she talks of her childhood, she sounds like a character in a Gabriel García Márquez novel. As a little girl, she says, she used to go to bed and dream her destiny into existence.
"My dreams felt almost too big . . . about being an artist . . . an actress or a dancer - I was dancing since I was four," she says. "It was my every night ritual, going to bed and dreaming about my future, and I feel that's how I created what I'm doing now. So now I'm dreaming about what I'll be doing when I'm 40 and 60 and 80."
She won't say what those dreams conjure up, for fear of tempting fate.
Penelope Cruz was born in Madrid to working-class parents. Her mother was a hairdresser, her father a car mechanic. The family loved films and music.
"In my house there was always opera playing as we cleaned the house on Sunday," she says. "We were all a little bit hippy. Naked. Cleaning the house listening to Bizet or Prokofiev." Cleaning and singing opera, naked? Even Almodóvar wouldn't risk a family scene quite so outré. She grins.
"I don't mean naked like that. I mean naked, very free. We were one of the first families to have a video machine, so my dad was always making movies at home, and we could rent movies. We didn't have much money, but the money we did have we put into things like that."
The family watched European films - she reels off the great directors she grew up on, mainly Italian: Fellini, Rossellini, De Sica.
She remains extremely close to her family. Her mother complains that whenever she is in Madrid she finds an animal in the street and brings it home for them to look after. Her siblings have followed her into the arts. Sister Monica, three years younger, is an actor and flamenco dancer. Brother Eduardo is 21 and a musician. She tells me he has released his first album, that he's written all the songs and played three instruments, and that it's brilliant in a punk-rocky way - and she heaves with pride.
It's eight years since Cruz first headed for America. She never moved over as such, always followed the work - in this case The Hi-Lo Country, a western made by British director Stephen Frears. But the offers kept coming, and she kept packing her bags. By then she was a huge star in Spain, and seemed to like the relative anonymity of the US.
Cruz soon lost her anonymity when she got together with Tom Cruise on Vanilla Sky, the confusing remake of the already confusing Spanish film, Open Your Eyes. It seemed too good a story to be true. Spain's most famous actress and Hollywood's most famous actor were an item. They looked a little like each other and, what's more, they shared the same surname. If the relationship hadn't been for real some marketing guru would have had to invent it. And, of course, there were those who suggested as much: that Cruz was raising her profile in America, and Cruise was bolstering his image as an irresistible Hollywood hunk. I'm curious about him - is he as weird as he seems, with the Scientology and the he-man act? On the other hand, Cruz is known for guarding her privacy. That, she's said, is how she holds on to herself and her sanity.
"I am friends with all the people I have been with," she says. "I am very good friends with the people who have meant something in my life, and I am so protective to the people who have been good to me, so I'm like a lion with that, and Tom is a very good man, and I am close to his whole family, his children. I love his children, and his mum, and all of his family, and he's a great man. The people who have been good to me, they are untouchable. I am very loyal."
Cruz is fearsome when she gets going, so different from the easy, giggly, hippy-dippy girl she can be.
"Nobody with common sense talks about their private life. It's easy to say, 'OK, I give you a little bit', and then you feel horrible with yourself. And I've been working hard since I was 16 and I've never talked about my private life, and I'm not going to change it now."
How would she describe her character? She relaxes. "She's a lion, too." No, not your character in Volver, your own character.
"I would use similar words to describe myself: strong, vulnerable, stubborn, hopeful and, how d'you say it when somebody worries too much?"
Neurotic? "No, not neurotic. A worrier. I could find any reason to worry about something right now." Little things or big? "Both. Sometimes I wake up at 7am to pee and in those two minutes I'm already trying to find out why we're here and what we don't know, and what I'm going to do in terms of having children, and I'm like, 'No, shut up, think about it later, go back to sleep.'"
Cruz would like children, lots of them. She says that it would be too risky just having one or two because she'd worry so much for them, it would make their lives a misery, so best spread the worry.
Is she aware of the biological clock ticking? "No, because I've just turned 32, and I still have a few years to do it, and when I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life."
Cruz recently bought a house in Los Angeles. Does she consider LA to be home now? "Madrid and LA. My main home is Madrid, but I also live in LA. It's a more normal life than in the beginning. At first, I would go to pick up the phone but there was nobody to call because everybody I knew was thousands of kilometres away."
That sounds lonely. "Yes, of course, but I don't want to complain about it because it made me strong and it taught me a lot of things. It taught me how to be with myself, with no fear. I've been creating a normal life there, taking my rituals from Spain. ."
Had she always wanted to work in America? "I don't know, because it hadn't happened before to an actress from my country, that she worked there with continuity. So I didn't have a reference. I thought it was almost impossible. But then I got a movie, and then I did a casting and got another movie. All my movies were castings."
Her parents had always told her it was good to strive, to exceed expectations. Was it a political household?
"It was very free," she says. "We were raised Catholic, but it was free religiously, too. Since I was a little girl I felt, in terms of politics, I was more going to the left."
How does she identify with the left? "Well, I like a lot of things about our president now." Bush? She opens her mouth in horror, and her already huge pupils appear to dilate. "No. Our president. In Spain. Who's my president? Zapatero . . . If I talk about our government, I talk about my country. I am a Spanish resident."
What about Bush? "I have always been against war. But I was particularly upset by the Iraq war. Every day you see 60 more dead, 80 more. You know when we were saying you create your future by imagining the future? When I dream about what the world will be like in a couple of centuries, it's always terrifying. We are getting to a point where war could mean something else, something even more horrific than what it meant before."
I ask her if she takes comfort from religion. "I don't call myself one thing. I like to study many religions."
Has she ever been attracted to Scientology, like Tom Cruise? "I have read a lot of books about it, and some of those things I have studied have helped me with things in my life. I would feel bad with myself if I didn't say that I was grateful to it because of what I've learned about it. A lot of my friends have been helped by their programme - they have got the most successful anti-drug programme in the world and they deserve a lot of credit for it."
Mostly Cruz is too maverick to fit neatly into Hollywood, despite her considerable success and the relationships with celebrity A-listers. She has, almost wilfully, refused to lose her accent, which means that she always has to play outsiders. She's said that it would have been easy to talk "American", but she has never wanted to.
For all that, in the past few years it looked as if Hollywood was likely to become her first home. But it seems less so now. When we talk, she reminds me repeatedly that her roots are in Spain. A few days after we meet, she and McConaughey announce they have split up; the time apart had taken its toll, they say.
For Cruz, it's crunch time. She says she will continue to divide her time between America and Europe. But you sense she feels the need to choose where she really wants to be - and fortunately for us, it is beginning to look as if home is where her heart is.
"I always told Pedro he was my priority," she says, "and right now we are already talking about our next movie together."
Volver is on release next Friday