Quotes of the Day
As a teenager back in her native Seville, Paz Vega made up her mind to become famous. Another Spaniard and fellow Andalucian, Antonio Banderas, had made it big in Hollywood, so why couldn't she? "I had always loved theater and cinema," says Vega, 29, over the phone from Miami, where she's promoting her latest film, Spanglish. "So one day I said to myself that I would become an actress."
Vega's breakthrough role came in 2001's Lucía y el Sexo (Sex and Lucía), in which she plays a luminous, besotted lover. Thinking her boyfriend has died in an accident, she travels to his favorite island where she uncovers a secret about his past. Her performance — tender, impassioned and real — won her a Goya award (Spain's Academy Award) for best new actress. Her early career had its memorable nude scenes, but it was Vega's ability to inject her characters with a fiery sensuality that kept Spanish eyes on her. Moments like the one in 2003's Carmen where Vega, all sweat and bosom, dances for a group of soldiers, consolidated her reputation for sexually charged performances. Now she is trying to seduce the U.S. with her first Hollywood film, Spanglish, a romantic comedy in which she stars alongside funnyman Adam Sandler and Téa Leoni. It opens this week in Spain and next week in Britain.
Vega plays Flor Moreno, a Mexican woman who moves with her daughter Cristina to Los Angeles and ends up working as a maid in the upscale home of successful chef John Clasky (Sandler) and his high-strung wife Deborah (Leoni). They don't speak Spanish and Flor doesn't know a word of English — it's a comedy of confusion. But with a message: Between the laughs, Flor struggles to protect her humble values and shield her daughter from the corrupting power of money. Vega's faltering English didn't deter director James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment, As Good as It Gets) from casting her. "I knew [Brooks] had been looking for somebody for a long time," says Vega. "They called me to do the part, but I told them I couldn't do it because I don't speak English. A friend of mine insisted I try, so I prepared a tape and sent it." Brooks took one look at the video and was sold.
In the end, says Vega, "the language issue was hardly a problem in the film. I speak mostly Spanish with a Mexican accent. That helps the story with all the idiomatic misunderstandings." In fact, the only real surprise Vega found in Hollywood was the scale of things. "In front of the camera, it's the same," she says. "The difference is in the surroundings. In America, for every single thing there are many more people involved. But it doesn't intimidate me; it makes me feel more supported, more protected."
If all goes well, Vega could have another comedy out before the end of the year: Di que Sí (Say I Do), in which she plays Estrella, an aspiring actress who agrees to star in a TV reality show. The rules: she has to spend a week at a beach resort with a nerdy cinema usher she despises — and pretend to be in love. In the film, Vega will do anything for the spotlight. Luckily for her, in real life, the world is already watching.
Cecile De France isn't, strictly speaking, from France. But that hasn't prevented the 30-year-old Belgian from becoming a favorite with her southern neighbors — and among the most promising actors in European cinema. With two films set for release in the U.S. and Europe this year, her popularity looks set to spread even further.
De France is best known for her role as Isabelle, the lesbian confidante and romantic tutor of French actor Romain Duris in the 2002 film L'Auberge Espagnole (The Spanish Apartment). The Barcelona-set tale of a group of European exchange students learning more about life from one another than from their course work was a global hit, thanks, in part, to De France's performance. It earned her a César (France's Academy Award) as best new actress. In the same year, she also showed she had a deft comic touch in the French romcoms Irène, the story of a lonely, uptight woman's search for love, and A + Pollux, as the elusive love interest of a man determined to find and claim her for good. "It wasn't planned that way, but being in three films in a single year produced maximum exposure," De France recalls.
That interest hasn't waned since. In 2003, she won the lead role in Haute Tension (High Tension) — an aptly titled, gore-drenched thriller successfully released in Europe as Switchblade Romance and set to appear in U.S. theaters in June. She has also clocked up an English-language debut in Frank Coraci's 2004 remake of Around the World in 80 Days, starring Jackie Chan. It was, says De France, a "big door of opportunity thrown open to my career." Yet she had to be coaxed into accepting the part. "I was already involved in a wonderful stage production of [August] Strindberg's Miss Julie with very close friends when the call from Los Angeles came saying I had the part — so I turned it down," admits De France. "It wasn't until several sleepless nights later, after a lot of urging from people, that I heard this voice say, 'Hey, Cécile, this is life knocking with a big opportunity.' Then I thought, maybe I'd better reconsider."
By contrast, De France didn't hesitate last year when French director and writer Cédric Klapisch called about Les Poupées Russes (Russian Dolls). His sequel to L'Auberge Espagnole reunites the original ensemble, including Amélie star Audrey Tautou, and revisits the students five years on as they face the c˙hallenges of adult life. "It was so wonderful getting together again that I think the same enthusiasm shines through," says De France. Yet her own tastes lie elsewhere: "American and French cinema are wonderfully creative and entertaining, but they lack the hard-edged, at times brutal messages, themes and humor of northern cinema culture." She says she'd love to make such films for directors like Denmark's Lars von Trier, Britain's Ken Loach or fellow Belgians (and brothers) Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne — a move that could extend
the appeal of De France well beyond la France.
Great French screen actors often sport formidable noses. Think Jean Gabin, Gérard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil. Now 21-year-old actor Louis Garrel is nosing ahead of his peers. His proboscis, thick as a prizefighter's, gives the actor a seriousness and weathered complexity beyond his years. His 2003 turn as a young movie-obsessed revolutionary in Bernardo Bertolucci's risqué The Dreamers won him immediate attention. The film, set in Paris just before the political riots of May 1968, "was a real collaborative process," explains Garrel, whose father, Philippe, is a director and fixture of 1970s Paris counterculture (himself the son of veteran actor Maurice Garrel), while his mother is actress Brigitte Sy. "Bernardo discussed the scenes and characters with [us] to the point that he incorporated our suggestions, changing scenes and adding our ideas to the film."
Garrel's follow-up project was even more daring. Ma Mère (My Mother) tells the story of a teenager's attraction to his promiscuous mother. The film managed to shock even French audiences with its fearless approach to a sordid sort of sexual awakening. "It's not really the nudity that's shocking, it's the emotional violence," says Garrel. "Actually, shooting these types of scenes is easy. It's watching them that's difficult," he says, recalling his embarrassment when his own mother saw Ma Mère.
Garrel already has another French movie in the can, directed by his dad. Like Bertolucci's Dreamers, Les Amants Réguliers (Regular Lovers), due for release in the fall, is set in 1968. It follows a group of protesters during the upheaval and afterward, when the world's attention has shifted. Up next — if funds materialize — is the Catherine Breillat film Une Vieille Maîtresse (An Old Mistress) with Asia Argento and French cinema grande dame Jeanne Moreau. The money will probably come; Garrel seems to have a nose for good projects.
Things just keep getting better for Maya Sansa. The 29-year-old Italian from Rome has been charming audiences with her crooked smile and combination of charisma and reserve since appearing in La Balia (The Nanny) in 1999. Critics liken her to her iconic compatriots Anna Magnani and Sophia Loren. This year everyone else will understand why. Sansa will appear in three films in Europe: the romantic drama L'Amore Ritrovato (An Italian Romance); the psychological thriller Contronatura (Unnatural); and her English-language debut, The Listening, a tale of espionage with Michael Parks (Kill Bill).
Sansa was halfway through an acting course at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama when a friend recommended her to the casting director working on Marco Bellocchio's film, La Balia. At the time, she didn't have the money to go to Rome for the audition. But a month later, Bellocchio still hadn't found his heroine and Sansa, whose grandmother had sent her money to come home for Easter, was determined to seize the opportunity. After six auditions, she got the part. "She was just a girl when I chose her for La Balia," says Bellocchio, "with a delicacy, a modest beauty, almost old-fashioned. She was outside the canon of current beauty."
While Sansa's sensuality makes her a natural choice for romantic leads, she's also able to carry character roles: see her sensitive and tormented performance as Italian statesman Aldo Moro's reluctant kidnapper in another Bellochio film, 2003's Buongiorno, Notte (Good Morning, Night). But Sansa remains wary of the Magnani and Loren comparisons, and she's confident enough about the future to take a break from moviemaking to spend time with her boyfriend in Paris. "You can get all wrapped up in this job," she says. "I don't want to lose myself. I want to keep centered and remember to listen to what I really want."
Sitting in a London bar, his black leather jacket rubbing up against the brown leather couch, Chiwetel Ejiofor casts a potent spell. But don't look at his hands. Because right now, the 27-year-old actor has hands like a girl — 2-cm-long nails brightly buffed and filed to an elegant curve. Ejiofor has just come from rehearsals for his latest project, The Kinky Boot Factory, a comedy in which he plays Lola, a sassy transvestite cabaret star. Press-on nails, his makeup team tell him, snap too easily, so Ejiofor's grown his own, acquiring some useful expertise in applying cosmetics in the process. "I've learned that wet nail polish gets everywhere," he says. "And you should always do your eye makeup first."
This stage-trained son of Nigerian refugees first turned heads in 2002, when Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things came out. Ejiofor's intense, understated performance as Okwe, the Nigerian exile who discovers an organ-trading ring operating in London, lifted what might otherwise have been a routine thriller into high drama. This year he'll be tough to avoid. In Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda, he plays a flirtatious pianist; in Red Dust, he stars alongside Oscar-winner Hilary Swank as a South African political activist called before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; in sci-fi feature Serenity, he's a hired killer. Looks like Ejiofor will have film audiences in the palm of his girlie hand. 
- Enrique Zaldua
- They've already appeared in a string of successful films, and now these actors are ready to depart for a much bigger stage