How Pedro Rescued Penelope

Penélope Cruz has arrived at the top, thanks, in part, to a bottom. The actress wears the plenteous prosthetic posterior under her 1950s Sophia Loren--inspired straight skirts and clingy cardigans in Pedro Almodóvar's new film, Volver. "Mothers have beeg bottoms," the Spanish director of culturally charged films says in accented English as he sprawls on a sofa next to Cruz in his suite at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles. "Your curves here are natural," he says to her, cupping his hands on his chest, "but not here," he says, pointing to his seat. "You walk very lightly. I wanted someone linked to the earth, someone exhausted after cleaning houses." Cruz shrugs. "He's better at explaining the fake bottom than I am."

If Almodóvar sounds--as he admits he does--"feelthy" when he discusses Cruz's physicality, "those eyes, her beautiful teets," she doesn't mind, since he has given the slender actress the weightiest role of her career (and also maybe because somehow it doesn't seem as feelthy coming from a gay guy). The Oscar-winning writer-director of Talk to Her and All About My Mother cast Cruz as the embodiment of motherhood in a movie about three generations of women surviving the wild winds of his home turf, La Mancha, Spain--winds that blow in fires, death and some superfluous men. Volver is Spanish for return. Fittingly, with the film, Almodóvar has reclaimed the Madrid-born Cruz from the lost- property department of blond and bland Hollywood, where she has lived for the past several years carrying the cross of exoticism through a series of disappointing movies and tabloid-tracked relationships with Sexiest Man Alive--type guys. With Volver, she is prompting people to talk Oscar. If she nabs him, she will be the first actress to win one in a foreign-language film since Sophia Loren in 1961 for Two Women.

As a teen, Cruz, now 32, saw Almodóvar's erotic comedy Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, starring another of Spain's cinema exports indebted to the director, Antonio Banderas. From then on, "my main motivation to become an actress was to work with Pedro," Cruz says. "I was kind of obsessed about it." In 1997, at 22, she got her wish, playing a prostitute loudly giving birth on a Madrid city bus in Live Flesh. Then the director, whose films are populated by heroic transvestites and lovable hookers, cast her in another memorable maternity part in All About My Mother, in 1999, this time as a pregnant, HIV-positive nun.

"I had an intuition that the way to work with Pedro is to become a piece of clay," says Cruz. "With somebody like him, you cannot go in with doubts because it would be the most stupid behavior. I wish I would have that feeling every movie I do, but it's not that way." Cruz's trust seems daughterly, but, insists the director, who is 57, with a shock of gray hair, "I don't like when she looks at me like a paternal figure. I behave with her like if I were Orlando Bloom, a young, attractive man actor that can also flirt with her." At the mention of Bloom, whom she's rumored to be dating, the private Cruz screams like a teenager being teased. "Orlando doesn't flirt with me! He's just my friend!" But Almodóvar, as he always does with Cruz, gets away with it. "Oh," he says, "I put Orlando as any young man who could flirt with you. I don't mean that we are going to make sex."