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Reel Women

Penelope Cruz
  • Posted at 5:43pm
  • 19 October 2007
  • by AndrewCollins-RT

When Pedro Almodóvar's captivating modern ghost story Volver was shown at the Toronto film festival last year, its Spanish star Penélope Cruz told reporters she'd had trouble leaving her character behind – not to mention her character's behind! She had been asked to wear what she delicately referred to as a "false ass" for the part of Raimunda because Almodóvar wanted her to resemble an Italian film heroine of the 1950s and 60s, and her own backside was deemed too "slender".

Cruz certainly cuts a suitably voluptuous figure in yet another celebration of womanhood from the Spanish director, and the hour-glass figure created by strategic padding puts you in mind of Sophia Loren in something directed by Alessandro Blasetti and co-starring Marcello Mastroianni from the mid-50s, when she made her name in Italy. (If you want to know more about Loren, she features as her adult self in Sophia Loren: Her Own Story.)

This was a boom time for both Italian cinema and the more shapely leading lady – think of Anna Magnani, or Claudia Cardinale (Once upon a Time in the West), Gina Lollobrigida or even the Swedish-born Anita Ekberg, whose romp in the Trevi Fountain in Federico Fellini's Rome-set La Dolce Vita became one of cinema's most memorable moments.

It always bothers me that the La Dolce Vita "remake" in the recent TV ad for Peroni beer features an angular model who looks positively emaciated in that black dress in the water. She's no Ekberg. A sign of the times, no doubt, with 21st-century actresses and models under crippling pressure from an image-obsessed media to slim down to virtually nothing. There is hope, however, for fans of the golden age of "real" women. Cruz and her soap-actress-sister Monica have designed a new fashion line for the Barcelona-based Mango chain, and they model their own designs. One hopes that neither asked, "Does my bum look big in this?"

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