Lining up accolades
Penelope Cruz, Pedro Almodovar back in Oscar buzz with ‘Parallel Mothers’
VENICE LIDO, Italy — Sound familiar?
Penelope Cruz is back in this year’s best actress Oscar buzz for “Parallel Mothers,” her seventh film collaboration with her friend, writer-director Pedro Almodovar.
Cruz’s first (of three) Oscar nomination was for Almodovar’s 2006 hit “Volver” — she won her best supporting actress Oscar for Woody Allen’s 2008 “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”
With nods to lingering wounds from Spain’s 1930s civil war, “Parallel Mothers,” which opens Jan. 14, casts Cruz as Janis, a photographer hired to document that conflict’s victims who are being exhumed from mass graves to be individually reburied 80 years later.
Janis copes with an unplanned pregnancy, unexpected relationships with a man and a much younger woman, and is forced to question her life, values and independence.
A dream role, custom-fitted especially for her, Janis represents Cruz’s willingness to work again and again with a filmmaker who wants nothing less than to see his exact vision of the story made visible.
“We have been working together so many years and projects. He has really given me so many opportunities.
So many different, challenging characters,” Cruz, 47, declared. “I am extremely grateful.
“I know that when he is preparing a film if he had anything right for me, he would call me. And if there wasn’t, he wouldn’t. And I respect that.
“When he calls me,” she continued, “he makes me happy — he’s really the reason why I became an actor. When I started to work as an actor I was very young, 16. And I saw ‘Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!’ You had to be 18 then and I had to lie to get into the theater. When I came out of the theater, I decided that I would be an actor.
“Also, I hoped one day I would work with him — and two years later he called me.
That was for ‘Kika’ (the 1993 film still stands as the director’s most controversial film) and I was too young.
“But from that first day we’ve been connected; we understand each other. We like working hard. He is so concentrated. He will not be speaking on his cellphone!”
Almodovar responded by saying, “I know (when I make a film), when I write and describe a character more or less her age, she’s my first choice.
“I admire her very much as an actress but what I want to say most is that it’s very important to know we speak the same language. I am a very demanding director and Janis is the most complex role — and she gives me everything I ask her.”