Next came Life's A Bitch (also known as It's All Lies), another raunchy comedy concerning dysfunctional relationships. Here a series of couples would suffer problems with kids, sex and money, Coque Malla playing a misanthropist who thinks his miserable life will change if he wins the heart of Penelope, the girl of his dreams, only to discover that she sends him completely barmy. She was excellent as the highly-strung Lucia, winning Best Actress at the Peniscola Comedy Film Festival. More serious would be Entre Rojas, set in 1974 Madrid, where she played a well-bred young woman jailed for 10 years for her relationship with a dissident protesting against the brutal regime of General Franco. Once inside, her horizons are broadened by contact with intellectuals and illiterates, friends and killers, and she regains hope and her love of life.
Having briefly reunited with Fernando Colomo and Coque Malla when she popped up as a party guest in The Butterfly Effect, where Malla played a Spanish student who falls for his own uninhibited aunt on a visit to London, Cruz then rejoined her Life's A Bitch director, Alvaro Armero, for Brujas - literally Witches. This would be a thoughtful drama where three women from separate generations are forced to spend a day together in a small town abandoned by its population due to the extreme heat. Contemporary Spanish society would be examined as the women discover their differences and similarities.
Having headlined in both drama and comedy, now came a series of productions marked by their variety and inventiveness, Cruz clearly attempting to widen her range. First came La Celestina, a version of Fernando De Rojas's classic 1499 novel which related the tragic romance of Calisto and Melibea (a precursor to Romeo And Juliet). Here Nancho Novo's Calisto would employ his servants and wise woman Celestina to woo Cruz's Melibea, only for it all to collapse into jealousy and murder. Next Penelope would reunite with Novo and Javier Bardem when she took a cameo in Not Love, Just Frenzy, a notoriously graphic depiction of Madrid night-life, rammed with drug-use and kinky sex. This would be followed by Love Can Seriously Damage Your Health which would track a crazy on-off relationship over three decades. Penelope would appear in an early segment, as a Beatles-mad girl in 1965, who breaks into John Lennon's hotel-room and finds herself hiding under the bed with a bell-boy, while Lennon services a groupie above them. Not to be left out, they get it on themselves, thus beginning the aforementioned sporadic 30-year affair.
1997 would bring a small role in the Danish drama A Corner Of Paradise, starring Samuel Froler and set in the 1950s. Here Froler would play a Swedish botanist and early environmentalist, working on research in Costa Rica, who realises that both the forests and indigenous peoples are being gradually eradicated by Agent Orange-spraying land barons. Romantic complication would be added by Froler's relationships with his girlfriend and with Penelope, playing the daughter of one of said barons. Then, having produced Jamon, Jamon with Bigas Luna, one of Spain's great maverick directors, she moved on to the grand-daddy of them all - Pedro Almodovar - then infamous for his Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Live Flesh, again seeing her cast beside Javier Bardem, would explore the complexities of love in a tale of betrayal, adultery, violence and unrequited desire, with Cruz playing the main protagonist's mother, a doomed prostitute we see in flashback as she gives birth to him.
But her big success of that year would be Alejandro's Amenabar's Open Your Eyes, a wild ride of a psychological thriller that saw Eduardo Noriega find what he thought was true love with the stunning Penelope. Unfortunately, his nutty girlfriend has other ideas and causes a car wreck that sees her killed and Noriega terribly disfigured. And then it gets really strange as he wakes up in a prison hospital, clad in a mask, accused of murder and no longer sure what has happened. Has he had an operation to rebuild his face, is he back with Cruz, and why does he keep seeing his dead girlfriend's ghost? Messing with time and minds it was a brilliant movie, fabulously entertaining and very influential, and it would have a very marked effect of Cruz's career.
1998 would be a big year for Penelope, seeing no fewer than five releases. First would come an adaptation of Moliere's Don Juan, following the adventures of an over-sexed nobleman in war-torn 17th Century Spain as he seduces castles-full of women. Penelope would play one of his victims, promised the world but given only a rogering, as would Emmanuelle Beart and Ariadna Gil (Cruz's co-star in Belle Epoque). After this, there'd be Twice Upon A Yesterday, a fantastical London-set romance where Douglas Henshall would play a cad dumped by his girlfriend but given the chance to travel back through time to sets things a-right. Penelope would play a mysterious barmaid who provides a shoulder for him to cry on.
Twice Upon A Yesterday would see Cruz begin a run of predominantly English-speaking movies. Next would come Talk Of Angels (actually filmed back in 1996), based on Kate O'Brien's novel Mary Lavelle and set against the Spanish Civil War. This saw Polly Walker as a betrothed Irishwoman who flees to Spain to work as governess to the three daughters of a wealthy family, then falls for Vincent Perez, playing their older, married brother. Produced by Miramax, this bodice-ripping epic had much in common with Gone With The Wind and Penelope, still extremely youthful in her looks, would somehow manage to convince as Pilar, the eldest and most sophisticated of Walker's charges. She'd then move on to The Girl Of Your Dreams where she reunited with Belle Epoque director Fernando Trueba to tell the true story of a group of Spanish film-makers who fled the Spanish Civil War to work in Germany, only to end up under the beady eye of Goebbels, Minister of Nazi Propaganda. With the team forced to work with German actors, there was plenty of room for comedies of misunderstanding. There was also a sub-plot where Penelope, star of the show (in reality this had been Imperio Argentina) and lover of the director, is forced to shack up with the repulsive Goebbels in order to keep him sweet - an indignity that would at least win Cruz a Goya.
