The Kid from Madrid

Movie star Penelope Cruz is enjoying a sort of jetlag in her celebrity, having recently moved to Hollywood from her native Madrid: “Here I’m going out every night because nobody recognizes me.”

Yet, that is. Those unfettered Melrose shopping sprees will soon be over. This season Cruz stars opposite Matt Damon in Billy Bob Thornton’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses.” After an early screening of the film, she is full of unqualified enthusiasm. “It’s the best movie I’ve ever seen in my life,” she says without a trace of guile. “I couldn’t speak it was so good! Es verdad.”

Yes, Cruz laughs in the face of modesty. “I think it’s good to be critical,” she says,”but you have to control yourself. You can kill your creativity that way.” Whether this is Spanish irony or a trick of self-translation, one can’t be sure.

But all in all, well said by a young woman who hasn’t made an awful movie yet. Cruz has been a household name in her native Spain since starring as one of four libidinous sisters in Fernando Trueba’s “Belle Epoque” at the age of 16. She caught the eye of Pedro Almodovar, who cast her as another seductress in “Live Flesh.” Cruz has some 15 European films to her credit, and last year appeared in her first English language film, “The Hi-Lo Country,” with Woody Harrelson, Billy Crudup and Patricia Arquette, playing the plain Texas country girl in contrast to Arquette’s WWII vamp.

Cruz claims that working in another language is actually a piece of cake. “It gives you freedom and distance,” she says. “I don’t hear Penelope talking. It’s like doing a period piece. It looks more difficult, but it’s easier.”

In other words, if we’re lucky, she might stick around. On this side of the ocean, she’s good friends with Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek, and she admires the career moves of Johnny Depp, the actor she would most like to emulate. “My intention is to bear a lot of temptations,” she says, meaning that she isn’t just in it for the dinero. As if to prove the point, Cruz is just back from Venezuela, where she followed up on “Pretty Horses” by filming “Woman on Top” with director Fina Torres.

“I play a Brazilian chef with motion sickness,” she says.

Home and abroad, Cruz is a shopaholic who loves fashion. “I can wear the same jeans for three days without taking them off,” Cruz says, “or I can wear high heels in the morning--I like clothes too much. It’s an addiction.”

In Almodovar’s latest, “All About My Mother,” Cruz doesn’t get to wear the director’s trademark flashy outfits. “I play a pregnant nun with AIDS, and the father is a transvestite,” she says. “And it’s not a comedy!” Cruz isn’t the least bit disappointed that the wardrobe moments go to her male co-stars. It’s all about the work, she insists--though her favorite line in the movie is when her character, Rosa, says, “I think Prada is very good for nuns.”

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Penelope Cruz’s look is “all about the eyes and hair,” says makeup artist Bethany Karlyn. “She’s a kitten with a mane.” Cruz recently added highlights to her hair and plans to keep them. “I think the black hair makes me look harder,” Cruz says. As for short hair, she tried it once and will never go back, though keeping up the commitment to longer locks “is very difficult.”

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One thing Cruz doesn’t experiment with is her trademark sultry eyes, rimmed in lots of liner, thick mascara and kohl pencil just inside the lash line. And nothing short of the deepest jet black will do. “She likes to wear the high, tipped-up almond-shaped eyes lined all the way around like Sophia Loren,” says Karlyn who added some slightly shimmery nude and white highlights. “The ‘50s kitten was very matte and the liquid liner was very shiny,” Karlyn says. “I went the opposite way to make it modern.”