In her acting prime

Cecilia Roth, whose commanding and heartfelt lead performance a few years ago in Pedro Almodovar’s “All About My Mother” affected audiences worldwide, knows exactly which topics an American journalist will want to discuss with the Argentine actress.

“Nudity and age,” says Roth, 46, with a hearty, good-natured laugh. It’s only logical, since Hollywood doesn’t usually give actresses over 40 complicated, sexy roles, like Roth’s characters in the Spanish “All About My Mother” and her new film, the Mexican comedy-thriller “Lucia, Lucia,” which opens Friday.

Roth, enjoying the prime of her career, says she encounters no such age bias in the Latin American and European countries where she works. If anything, the better roles are written for the more mature.

“In our countries, you can get very complex roles at this age because nobody is thinking about the age of the character, nobody,” says Roth, adding that Hollywood’s emphasis on beauty and youth perplexes her. “It’s very strange for us. Actors, men and women, can play more complex roles when you are older. I am sure about that.”

Based on the bestselling Spanish novel “La Hija del Canibal” (The Cannibal’s Daughter) by Rosa Montero, “Lucia, Lucia” follows the misadventures of the title character, a children’s book writer who becomes distraught when her husband disappears in a Mexico City airport just before they are to leave on a vacation. With the help of two oddball neighbors, an aging Spanish revolutionary (Carlos Alvarez-Novoa) and a sensitive young man half her age (Kuno Becker) who is prone to quoting philosophers, Lucia resolves to find out what happened. In the process, she starts to question the life she had settled into, awakening to new possibilities.

Writer-director Antonio Serrano -- whose first film, “Sex, Shame & Tears,” is the second highest-grossing film in Mexico (behind last year’s “El Crimen del Padre Amaro”) -- pictured Roth as Lucia while he was writing the adaptation. Roth had read the novel and was immediately excited when he called her.

“I loved the character of Lucia and I decided yes, just in one second,” she says. “It was very attractive to an actress, so intense a role.”

Roth especially enjoyed the comedic aspects of the character, as Lucia bumbles with the cops, bureaucrats and apparent kidnappers and slightly embellishes her narration of the story.

Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Roth fled with her father and brother in 1976 to Spain, where they lived in exile during the harsh military rule of Argentina. She returned in 1985. Roth remembers discovering acting in grade school. She attended drama school in Argentina and later in Spain, where she got her professional start playing small roles in Almodovar’s early films.

But it wasn’t until Almodovar saw Roth in the 1997 Argentine film “Martin (Hache)” -- for which she won a best actress Goya, Spain’s equivalent of the Oscar -- that he was inspired to write for her the dynamic leading role in “All About My Mother” of a woman whose tragic loss leads to unexpected rebirth. Roth was overcome.

“He phoned me one day and told me that and I just fell down,” she says. Roth won her second best actress Goya for that film.

When it’s suggested that there are parallels between her characters in “Lucia, Lucia” and “All About My Mother,” as both are middle-aged women who undertake life-changing journeys after a traumatic event, Roth says, “Maybe, maybe. But all 40-year-old female characters are looking for something!”

In “Lucia, Lucia,” her character looks for that something, albeit hesitantly, in a romance with her handsome younger neighbor, played by Becker, who will be seen in Christopher Hampton’s forthcoming “Imagining Argentina” with Emma Thompson and Antonio Banderas.

“It was an honor to work with her,” Becker, 25, says of Roth. “I learned a lot because this was my first film.” Known for his work on Mexican telenovelas, Becker says he was a little nervous about filming their love scenes, but Roth put him at ease.

“It’s the first time I was totally naked in a scene,” he says. “She was very nice with me, I was very nice with her. We had fun.”

As to filming love scenes with a younger man, that wasn’t a problem for Roth who has before, with Juan Diego Botto (of “The Dancer Upstairs”) in “Martin (Hache)” and with Gael Garcia Bernal (of “Y Tu Mama Tambien”) in the 2001 Argentine film “Vidas Privadas” (Private Lives).

“I’m asking, ‘Why not in my life?’ ” says Roth, who is married to well-known Argentine musician Fito Paez, who directed her in “Vidas Privadas,” his first film.

Roth would like to work in English-language films but the offers she received after “All About My Mother” didn’t interest her.

“I have the same attitude in front of an Argentinian script or a Spanish script or an American script,” she says. “I hope that I can receive more.”

For now, Roth is taking a break. Although she made an uncredited appearance in Almodovar’s last film, “Talk to Her,” the two don’t have plans for another project.

Next, Roth wants to do theater. “Maybe I can do the same play in Buenos Aires, Mexico, Madrid,” she says. “That’s the plan.”

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‘Lucia, Lucia’

When: Opens Friday in general release

MPAA rating: R for sexuality, language and brief drug use