Penélope Cruz Sánchez (born 28 April 1974) is a Spanish actress. Prolific in Spanish and English-language films, her accolades, include an Academy Award, BAFTA Award, a David di Donatello and three Goya Awards.

Cruz made her acting debut on television at age 16, and her feature film debut the following year in Jamón Jamón (1992). Her subsequent roles included Belle Époque (1992), Open Your Eyes (1997), Don Juan (1998), The Hi-Lo Country (1999), The Girl of Your Dreams (2000) and Woman on Top (2000). She collaborated with Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar in Live Flesh (1997), All About My Mother (1999), Volver (2006), Broken Embraces (2009), I'm So Excited! (2013), Pain and Glory (2019), and Parallel Mothers (2021).

For her role in Woody Allen's romantic drama Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Cruz won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Her other Oscar-nominated roles are in Volver (2006), Nine (2009), and Parallel Mothers (2021). Other films include Vanilla Sky (2001), Blow (2001), Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011), The Counselor (2013), Murder on the Orient Express (2017), Everybody Knows (2018), Official Competition (2022), L'immensità (2022), and Ferrari (2023). For her role as Donatella Versace in the miniseries The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (2018), she received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. She is the only Spanish actress to have won an Academy Award and to have received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2007 she won the David di Donatello for the leading role in Don't Move.

Cruz has also modelled for Mango, Ralph Lauren and L'Oréal, and designed clothing for Mango with her younger sister Mónica Cruz. She has been a house ambassador for Chanel since 2018. She volunteered in Uganda and India, where she spent one week working with Mother Teresa, and donated her salary from The Hi-Lo Country to help fund the late nun's mission.

Cruz was born on 28 April 1974 in the town of Alcobendas, province of Madrid, Spain, to Encarna Sánchez, an Andalusian hairdresser and personal manager, and Eduardo Cruz, an Extremaduran retailer and car mechanic. She has two siblings, Mónica, also an actress, and Eduardo, a singer. She also has a paternal half-sister, Salma. She was raised Roman Catholic. Cruz grew up in Alcobendas, and spent long hours at her grandmother's apartment. She said she had a happy childhood. Cruz remembers "playing with some friends and being aware that I was acting as I was playing with them. I would think of a character and pretend to be someone else."

Initially, Cruz focused on dance: she studied classical ballet for nine years at Spain's National Conservatory. She took three years of Spanish ballet training and four years of theatre at Cristina Rota's school. She said that ballet instilled discipline that proved important in her acting career. When she became a cinephile at ten or eleven, her father bought a Betamax machine, which was then quite rare in her neighborhood.

As a teenager, Cruz became interested in acting after seeing the film Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990) by Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. She did casting calls for an agent but was rejected several times because the agent felt that she was too young. Cruz commented on the experience, "I was very extroverted as a kid.... I was studying when I was in high school at night, I was in ballet and I was doing castings. I looked for an agent and she sent me away three times because I was a little girl but I kept coming back. I'm still with her after all these years." In 1989, at the age of fifteen, Cruz won an audition at a talent agency at which more than 300 other girls had applied. In 1999, Katrina Bayonas, Cruz's agent, commented, "She was absolutely magic [at the audition]. It was obvious there was something ... impressive about this kid.... She was ... green, but there was a presence. There was just something coming from within."

Her father, Eduardo, died at his home in Spain in 2015, aged sixty two, from a heart attack.