Penelope Cruz has a new love... but don't ask her about it, finds Will Lawrence.

WHEN Penelope Cruz first met Woody Allen, she wondered if she might have done something wrong. The 34-year-old actress had travelled to Allen's hometown of New York to discuss a part in the legendary director's Golden Globe-winning sex comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona. "The meeting lasted about 40 seconds," she smiles. "We met, he said he was pleased to meet me, and then we were done. It was so brief."

As it later transpired, Allen was impressed. "Sometimes he takes Polaroids of actors, he told me," she continues. "Sometimes he doesn't talk at all. With me, he talked and we laughed together and I think we connected. I guess he is just shy at the beginning. He doesn't talk much but he was making jokes and really making me laugh. In those 40 seconds I felt that we could understand each other, the humour, and a month later he called me and said that he was almost finished with the script and that he thought I could play the character. He offered me the movie and I was so happy to hear that."

No doubt. In many ways Vicky Cristina Barcelona proved the perfect film for Cruz, who plays neither Vicky (Rebecca Hall) nor Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), but Maria Elena, a super-passionate neurotic who pops up halfway through the film and steals every subsequent scene. For Cruz the movie, shot entirely in her homeland of Spain, offered the opportunity to star as a thoroughly intriguing character. It also heralds a welcome return to form for a director whose recent, London-set output has marked the nadir of his long career. The story revolves around the eponymous females, who find themselves swept off their feet by bohemian painter Juan (Javier Bardem) while visiting Spain. Sparks fly when Juan's demented, suicidal ex-wife (Cruz) appears.

Bardem carouses with all three women on screen, and in real life, he and Cruz are now an item. Did the passionate movie help to fire their love? "I'm not talking about that," she snaps rather coldly. "It's no-one else's business."

In truth, I'm not too surprised. Bardem and Cruz have just spent the morning holed up in a Barcelona hotel fielding questions from the Spanish press, who only wanted to talk about the couple's nascent relationship. Bardem and Cruz are something of a Spanish Posh and Becks. When the Spanish reporters ignored their requests to avoid the subject, they walked out of the room. If I want to keep Cruz in this particular hotel room, I can't talk about Bardem. "I never discuss my private life," she insists.

Given that she has previously dated Matt Damon and Tom Cruise, this is perhaps understandable. She and Cruise got together in 2002, after he had split from Nicole Kidman, and while America knew who Cruz was, it didn't really know what she did. She'd enjoyed huge success in Europe, starring in the Oscar-winning foreign language film, Belle Epoque, and a clutch of other memorable movies, including the acclaimed Jamon, Jamon, but for American audiences she was primarily Cruise's latest squeeze.

For a woman who had toiled to break into Hollywood - which is never easy for foreign actors - it must have been galling to see her own career overshadowed by her relationship. When the couple broke up in 2004, Cruz had to fight to maintain her position in Tinseltown.

She was only 30 years old but had travelled a tempestuous road. She was born Penelope Cruz Sanchez in Madrid. Her father, Eduardo, was a retailer, her mother, Encarna, a hairdresser, and the family lived in the working-class suburb of Alcobendas. She has one younger sister, Monica, who is a professional flamenco dancer and TV star, and a younger brother, named after his father. The family was close-knit, but fairly poor.

"We didn't have much money then, no," she says. "But we had what we needed. We had enough, but also not too much so that we were not growing up in a way that money was of no value. It had a big value because my parents had to work so hard, six days a week, just so we could have the basics. I loved being part of a family like that, where both my dad and my mother worked very, very hard. It was very inspiring for me to see that my mum was so strong. It was both of them bringing us up. I loved growing up like that."

AS a child she was a natural performer, apparently mimicking TV ads as soon as she could walk. From the age of four, however, it was dance that captured her imagination and went on to dominate her younger years. She spent almost a decade studying classical dance at Spain's National Conservatory, including three years of ballet with Angela Garrido, and a stint of jazz dance with Raul Caballero, but dropped out of secondary education at 15 and became a part-time fashion model. While she pursued her drama studies in Madrid, she also appeared in music videos, including one for the popular Spanish band Mecano whose singer, Nacho Cano, she dated until 1996.

"I loved the dancing," she smiles, her iciness melting slightly. "Music for me is the most powerful art. I am obsessed with movies. They are such big things in my life and they inspire me constantly, not just as an actress but as a person. They have been so important in my life. But music is at the top of the list in the arts. Sound goes directly to the heart.

"I like a lot of different things. I listen to classical music a lot because I studied ballet for 17 years, so I love Prokofiev and Mahler, but also I love Radiohead. I love the song, which isn't very happy, the one that starts Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon'' Everything In Its Right Place, from the 2000 album Kid A. That song scared me so much when I heard it. I became obsessed with it."

Cruz moved into the entertainment business, where she was a presenter for children's TV station Tele 5. She subsequently had roles in two small films, The Greek Labyrinth and Framed, before becoming a true national darling in Fernando Trueba's 1992 film Belle Epoque, set in rural Spain in the 1930s, in which an army deserter is sheltered by an anarchistic artist and courts his benefactor's four beautiful daughters (Cruz plays the youngest). The film was a huge hit in Spain, winning nine Goya awards, and would go on to take the Oscar for best foreign language film in 1994.

More success in her homeland followed, with Bigas Luna's Jamon, Jamon, a tumultuous sex comedy that also featured Bardem. Both Cruz and Bardem were nominated for Goyas, and the movie scooped the Silver Lion at the 1992 Venice Film Festival. The acclaim did much to calm the rumpus over the 16-year-old Cruz appearing topless - often with Bardem's head buried between her breasts - which had upset her then boyfriend, Cano.

"Sure I worried about that," she says. "Ever since I was a little girl I've worried too much, I worry about everything for months. It always bothers me because sometimes you end up worrying more about the worry and you are not resolving things that are right there in front of you. You are three weeks ahead or 10 years ahead, thinking of worries. I have been like that all my life, and it's hard to change."

Has she learned to deflect the worry? "I try to improve it. There are ways to make it better but it always takes work. It is hard - hard for me and hard for most of the people I know."

Meanwhile, Cruz spent the next six years forging her career in Europe, striking up a bountiful professional relationship with director Pedro Almodovar, with whom she has now shot four films, including 2006's Volver, for which she was nominated for an Oscar and Los Abrazos Rotas (Broken Embraces), which will be released in August.

"Pedro and I are very good friends but it always changes when we are on the set," she notes. "Then we have to keep our relationship very polite and very sincere. He always tells me the truth if something is poor or if it isn't. There is honesty and I really appreciate that. We don't behave on the set like we are the good friends that we are. What I love about him most is that he treats human confusion with such beautiful irony. He has that in common with Woody Allen. I think they both do that better than anybody."

In many ways, 2006 proved a key turning point for Cruz. She had already forged ahead in Hollywood with The Hi-Lo Country, All The Pretty Horses, Blow, Vanilla Sky and Captain Corelli's Mandolin, and conjured her Oscar-nominated performance for Almodovar. Then, with her relationship with Cruise far behind her, she signed up as the face of L'Oreal, a move that brought her international fame. She and her sister now produce a clothing range for the fashion house Mango.

FOR now, though, Cruz is concentrating on acting, and her most recent role, in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, stands as one of her most vigorous yet. Her character, Maria Elena, is a complex, suicidal woman, as passionate as she is unhinged. She seems a challenging character. "Oh she is," agrees Cruz. "We get the impression that she thinks she is too special to be happy and that in order to continue to be special she has to keep torturing herself and playing with self-destruction to very risky levels. That makes it impossible for her to relate to the rest of the world, to have any normal relationship. The character, she really suffers like an animal. She is not happy."

Is Cruz? "I have had a very singular kind of life since I started working so young, so I am very used to travelling, working, taking time for myself. Now my life feels more balanced. Once it was all work, now I do take time for myself, and time for work. It was a hard lesson also to know that sometimes it is so much healthier to say no to a lot of jobs that you like. I've worked myself to exhaustion before."

Indeed, her first breakdown came when she was just 17 and struggling to juggle her first professional commitment - "I was so young and I thought I could do everything, but it was all too much for my body and my mind" - and the second came in 2002 following back-to-back film shoots for Woman On Top (1999), All The Pretty Horses (2000), Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001) and Blow (2001).

"I did not stop working for the whole summer, and then I went to Calcutta where I was making a documentary for a Spanish foundation to raise money for kids. I couldn't delay the trip even though I was so tired, so when I returned to America afterwards, I broke down - out of exhaustion and also because of everything I saw in India. I would just work, work, work. I think that now I have more discipline that way I've learned that I must take time to rest and not just go from set to set, from film to film.

"I would do four movies a year before, while now I have a situation that is more disciplined. I don't want to be doing four movies a year and I haven't done that for the last few years. Nowadays, I am very happy in my life."

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is out on February 6