Woman Nearly on Top

By RICHARD CORLISS

Penelope Cruz has ugly feet. Well, gnarled. "All of them are twisted," she says, rubbing her feet in the courtyard of the Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood. "I used to bleed from dancing so much. I would peel my toenails off and throw them away because they were completely black from the pain. To look at them now and see they are like this--they have a lot of life for me." That's why, when you ask her to name her favorite part of her body, she wiggles her toes.

We thus conclude the what's-less-than-perfect-about-Penelope-Cruz portion of this story. With her moony eyes, graceful neck, slim yet voluptuous figure, amazingly long fingers and distinctive nose, Cruz could be the love child of Sophia Loren and Ringo Starr. Even those feet...well, they have character. The one thing she lacks is American renown, and that's sure to change, considering the movie company she's keeping. The co-stars of her next four films are Matt Damon (in Billy Bob Thornton's All the Pretty Horses), Johnny Depp (in Ted Demme's Blow), Nicolas Cage (in John Madden's Captain Corelli's Mandolin) and Tom Cruise (in Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky).

"She's the kind of person you see in a movie, and it's like, wow!" says Crowe, revving into high-ecstatic mode. "Yet for someone that beautiful, she doesn't lead with her looks. Her silent moments are as great as when she speaks. Everybody says 'Audrey Hepburn' when they speak about her, and that's one of the big Audrey parts of her: she can turn a little silent moment into a one-act play. She also has this sense of humor that's waiting to pounce. The cool thing is she doesn't play 'girlish' like a lot of American actresses who go through all these light romantic comedies and end up playing cute for years. She never played cute; she played substance and soulfulness--very romantic, but not in a gooey way."

You put the leash back on Crowe and wonder, who is this goddess? An accomplished charismatizer from Madrid. She was born there 26 years ago to a mechanic and a hairdresser, and named after a sweet dirge by poet-bard Joan Manuel Serrat ("Penelope, your sad eyes glow at the sound of a distant train"). Comely and outgoing, she studied ballet and acting as a child, was signed by a talent agent at 15 and was soon dancing in a Schweppes orange-soda commercial. At 17 she earned raves as a teen temptress in the loopy sex farce Jamon Jamon. "I cried when the movie ended," she says, in the lilting English she learned during two years of dance study in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, "but I also knew that film was going to be my life."

Cruz has been beguiling international audiences since 1992, when she played the youngest of four loving sisters in the Oscar-winning Belle Epoque. She gave birth on a city bus in Pedro Almodovar's Live Flesh, played a pregnant nun in Almodovar's All About My Mother, made love to a disfigured roue in Open Your Eyes, resisted the advances of Joseph Goebbels in The Girl of Your Dreams and, in her first American role, provided a beacon of moral beauty for cowboy Billy Crudup in The Hi-Lo Country.

Viewers who can't wait for Cruz-Cage or Cruz-Cruise can catch her in full radiance in Fina Torres' trifle Woman on Top, a romance with a passion-fruity color scheme about a Brazilian who comes to San Francisco and rises to stardom as a TV chef. The movie is both too long and this big, but it is smartly unrelenting in its adoration of its star, enveloping Penelope in slo-mo and soft focus while it bestows magical powers on her character--when a drop of her sweat falls on a rosebud, it instantly blooms. And when Cruz is onscreen, so does the film. It also captures an element of this bombshell's star quality: a disarming sweetness.

Cruz turn-ons: walks on lonely beaches ("I like the Bahamas, where you can walk in the sea for kilometers and the fish play with you; there are no people around, it's completely empty") and charity work. After interviewing Mother Teresa for a Spanish newspaper, Cruz was so moved she reportedly donated her salary from The Hi-Lo Country to the Albanian nun's mission. She has also interviewed the Dalai Lama. "It was like a present spending time with people like them. I don't vote, and I haven't yet found something or someone I really believe in. But these are two of the people I admire the most."

Turn-offs: gossipmongers. In April, when shown a PEOPLE story that linked her romantically to Damon, she showed a little Iberian fire. "We say it's not true, and they keep writing it. Because we go bowling? Don't you think this is crazy?" The stories, and the denials, continue. But those are the taxes to pay when you are gorgeous, gifted and in love with acting. "I feel privileged to be able to do this with my time," she says. "I couldn't go to work that I didn't like. I think I'd prefer to go to India or live in a tree."

Chances are, if Penelope Cruz goes to live in a tree, all Hollywood will be standing below, hoping she'll fall into their arms.

--Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles