Biography:
Penelope Cruz was born in Madrid on April 28, 1974. She is one of three children of a merchant and a hairdresser. After years of intensive study in ballet and jazz, she broke into acting in 1992. That year, she had starring roles in Jamón Jamón and Belle Epoque. The former cast her as the desperately poor daughter of a village prostitute, while the latter featured her as one of four lusty daughters of a wealthy man in pre-Franco Spain. Belle Epoque proved to be a huge success, winning nine Goya Awards (the Spanish equivalent of an Academy Award) and an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Its success gave Cruz international recognition, and, after starring in a number of Spanish films, she enhanced this recognition in 1997 with the Sundance entry Abre los Ojos. That same year, she had a brief but memorable role in Pedro Almodóvar's Carne Trémula.

One of Spain's foremost leading ladies of the 1990s, Penelope Cruz has made a magnificent cross-over into international star status. In 1998, Cruz had her first starring role in an English language film, playing Billy Crudup's Mexican-American love interest in Stephen Frears' The Hi-Lo Country. She had another go at English later that year in the Spanish-British romantic comedy Twice Upon a Yesterday, which cast her as a Spanish barmaid living in London. In 1999, she returned to Spain to collaborate once again with Almodóvar on Todo Sobre Mi Madre, a wildly acclaimed film that premiered at Cannes that year. Her next big project was Woman on Top (2000), an American comedy about a chef with bewitching culinary skills and a severe case of motion sickness. While in the US, she also signed up to star opposite Johnny Depp in the drug-trafficking drama Blow (2001) and opposite Matt Damon in Billy Bob Thornton's All the Pretty Horses (2000). Cruz says she's wary of being typecast as a beautiful young damsel, but it's hard to imagine disguising her wide-eyed charms and generous nature (she once donated an entire paycheck to Mother Teresa's children's sanctuary). Recently she has also starred opposite Nicholas Cage in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky. Penelope also continues to make films in her native Spain.