Celebrity Gossip /By Liz Smith
Critics go mad for Cruz
What next can we expect from cinema’s enfant terrible, Pedro Almodovar and his fantastically created star, Penelope Cruz? Their tandem filmmaking has already entered history and she is only 35 years old.
Pedro’s latest “Broken Embraces” didn’t seem to make good waves recently at Cannes. It concerns a director, played by Lluis Homar, who has become blind and has turned to screenwriting. He sits in the dark reliving his doomed romance with Penelope, now the mistress of a tycoon, and tries to make a documentary about them.
The critics say this film is “too convoluted” and advise Pedro to stick to more deeply felt narratives such as “All About My Mother” or “Volver.” But the carpers went mad for Ms. Cruz, with critic David Gritten saying she “gives a far more nuanced performance than for last year’s Oscar-winning work for Woody Allen in ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona.’ ”
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It’s always fun to write something about a performer who you actually know well, so I’ll take a personal moment to rave about my longtime pal, actress Holland Taylor.
She appeared recently in More magazine’s “10 Women Who Make Us Laugh” and I congratulate writer- editor Kathy Heintzelman for including our own Holland with a few women even more celebrated. (Whoopi Goldberg, Tracey Ullman, Lily Tomlin, Diane Keaton, Kathy Griffin, Wanda Sykes, Ellen DeGeneres, Jane Krakowski and Margaret Cho.)
Holland is 66 but looks maybe
30. She plays Charlie Sheen’s sexy realtor mother in the CBS hit sitcom “Two and a Half Men” and has often provided the basis for the show’s most ravishing laughs. This season the writers have neglected her to their own detriment, in my opinion.
Holland will be joining Buck Henry, Haskell King and Lisa Ebersole this summer in the play “Mother,” to be seen in the East Village of NYC from July 8 to Aug. 1.
The director is Andrew Grosso. She is also readying a one-woman play she is writing herself, in which she’ll be reviving the spirit of the late Ann Richards, onetime governor of Texas.
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