Spanish film in Spanish Unlimited.

Is there a Latino Explosion?

Much has been made of the "Latino explosion" in the entertainment industry in the last few years, with the emergence of stars Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin, Marc Anthony, and Salma Hayek.

While these performers have achieved household-name status, two lesser-known actors have already secured a more select kind of glory. Two weeks ago, Benicio Del Toro joined the very small group of Latino actors nominated for an Academy Award and Javier Bardem became the first Spanish actor ever to receive an Oscar nomination.

That short list includes Puerto Rican natives José Ferrer (nominated three times, and a winner for 1950's Cyrano de Bergerac), Rita Moreno (a winner for 1961's West Side Story), and Rosie Perez (nominated for 1993's Fearless); Cuban-born Andy Garcia (nominated in 1990 for The Godfather, Part III); Los Angeles native Edward James Olmos (nominated for 1988's Stand and Deliver); and Mexican-born Anthony Quinn, a four-time Oscar nominee and a two-time winner.

So is there a latino explosion? Certainly the answer is "yes". Mainstream America is realizing that this is becoming a bicultural and bilingual country and that it is accepted to speak Spanish. Now even Latinos that have forgotten how to speak Spanish are learning again.

So here you can know more about the latino cultura and about the people who is leadin Spanish to be one of the most important language of the world.

Benicio del Toro

When Benicio Del Toro first announced to his father and siblings that he intended to pursue a career in acting, they didn't take the news very well. As Del Toro told one interviewer, "My family freaked when I told them I wanted to be an actor. It was like telling them I wanted to be an astronaut. On top of that, it was like saying that in order to be an astronaut, I was going to have to drive a cab in New York for five years.

" The family probably felt that its worst fears had been realized when Del Toro won his first movie role, playing "Duke the Dog-Faced Boy," in the ill-contrived sequel to Pee-WeeÆs Big Adventure, Big Top Pee-Wee. Undaunted by the execrable effort, Del Toro stuck it out, and over the course of the next several years, he paid the bills with a steady stream of supporting roles, both in films and on television, including several memorable portrayals of drug-dealing heavies.

His career caught fire with the role of enunciation-challenged con man Fred Fenster in Bryan Singer's stunning ensemble crime drama The Usual Suspects (1995), a performance for which he won an Independent Spirit Best Supporting Actor award; he won the same award the following year for his work in the critically lauded biopic Basquiat. With a résumé comprised in equal measures of mainstream fare and independent projects, Del Toro is uniquely positioned to become a draw both at the box office and on the film-festival circuit.

Now living in Los Angeles, Del Toro maintains a low profile between movies, and has thus far managed to avoid becoming entangled in any celebrity romances. His screenwriting and directing debut short Submission, which starred a pre-celebrity Matthew McConaughey, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1995. The fledgling filmmaker would like to direct again at some point, but has said of himself, "I get quite embarrassed with my acting when I see it on the screen. I would imagine with a film that's my own, I'd be really embarrassed and have to leave the country." While he may not get behind the camera again anytime soon, he's spent plenty of time in front of it: 1998 brought a role as lawyer and Hunter S. Thompson confidante Oscar Acosta in the Terry Gilliam-directed Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; and Del Toro had a banner year in 2000, with his Golden Globe- and Oscar-winning supporting performance in Steven Soderbergh's drug war-focused drama Traffic, and his co-starring turn in Guy Ritchie's well-received crime caper Snatch.

Javier Bardem

Like Antonio Banderas or Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem is an excellent young Spanish actor who is very recognised in Spain because of his extraordinary talent and compromise with each role he performs. Now, after his last film Before Night falls he is becoming a star out of Spain. These three Spanish Actors shared works together, and were directed by Pedro Almodóvar.

Javier Bardem was born 32 years ago in The Cannary Islands. He belongs to a very well know Spanish actors family. His mother, Pilar Bardem is a great actress, also his grandparents, uncle and brother Carlos. This particular situation made him to grow up in the world of theatre and cinema, discovering everything related to acting.

Besides his love for performance, Javier Bardem has another passions: sports, like boxing and rugby or painting and drawing.
His first appearance as a very young actor was when he was six and he worked in a TV program directed by Fernando Fernán Gómez, another great actor and writer, also very famous in Spain.
But his first professional work was 11 years ago, in 1990, when appeared in Las Edades de Lulú, directed by Bigas Lunas, a Spanish director who loves to work with Javier Bardem. There are three more interesting films where they worked together: Jamón, Jamón (1992), Huevos de Oro (1993) and La Teta y la Luna (1994).

During this decade he won some of the relevant awards an actor can obtain: In 1993, The Fotogramas de Plata, in 1994 was nominated as Best Actor for the Goya Award, in 1994 obtained The Best Actor Award in The San Sebastian's Festival, in 1995 was awarded with The Goya as Supporting Actor, and in 1998 was nominated for the Goya as Best Actor.
After more than 20 films, he is now nominated to the Oscar Award as Best Actor, because of his role of Reynaldo Arenas an homosexual Cuban writer in Before Night Falls, where he was directed by Julian Schnaebel.. This is Javier Bardem's first work made out of Spain and spoken in a foreign language (English) and his nomination the first one given to an Spanish Actor is this category.

Since the first time the film became a success in every festival where it was shown and Javier Bardem started to be regarded as a new star. Next March 25th, will be a great opportunity for Javier to introduce himself and show his talent to other colleagues from different countries and stages. We hope people could appreciate his professionalism in all work he does.

Some of his relevant works are: Días Contados (1994) by Imanol Uribe, Extasis (1996) by Mariano Barroso, Perdita Durango (1997) by Álex de la Iglesia, Live Flesh (1997) by Pedro Almodóvar, and Los Lobos de Washington (1999) by Mariano Barroso

Pedro Almodovar

In 2000 he has been awarded with the "Oscar Academy Award" for the �Best foreign language film� (�All about my mother�). Almodovar explain the idea. ""After shooting �The Flower of My Secret� I took down some notes about the character of Manuela, the nurse who appears at the beginning of the film. A normal woman, who in the simulations (in which doctors who participate in the Transplant Seminary dramatize a situation in which they communicate to a hypothetical mother the death of her son) became a true actress, much better than the doctors with whom she played the scene.

My idea at the beginning was to make a movie about the capacity to act of certain people who are not actors. As a child, I remembered seeing that quality in some of the women in my family. They faked more and better than men. And through their lies they managed to avoid more than one tragedy. Forty years ago, when I was living there, La Mancha was an arid and machista region, in whose families reigned the Man from his armchair, upholstered in shiny sky. Meanwhile, the women really resolved the problems, in silence, having sometimes to lie in order to do so. (Is this the reason why Garcia Lorca said that Spain had always been a country of great actresses?).

Against this Manchegan machismo which I remember (perhaps enlarged) from my childhood, the women faked, lied, hid, and that way allowed life to flow and develop, without men finding out or obstructing it. (Aside from being vital, this was quite spectacular. The first spectacle that I remember seeing was a group of women talking on the patio.) I didn�t know it then but this was going to be one of the subjects of my thirteenth film, the capacity of women to playact, to fake. And wounded maternity. And the spontaneous solidarity between women. �I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,� said Williams through Blanche Dubois. In �All About My Mother,� the kind strangers are women"".

Pen�lope Cruz

Will success spoil Penélope Cruz? At age 26 she seems to be on target to become a major Hollywood star. A ravishingly beautiful woman, Cruz has established herself as Spain's most popular actress of her generation. Winning her country's coveted Goya Award as best actress last year is already a powerful indication that Cruz is destined to enjoy the kind of extraordinary career -in Spain and abroad- that no other Spanish actress has ever achieved.Last March, Cruz was seen with fellow Spaniard Antonio Banderas presenting the Oscar for best foreign film to Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, for Todo Sobre mi Madre, which coincidentally starred her in one of her most difficult roles to date.

In addition, she's now appearing in Woman on Top, the romantic comedy about a Brazilian chef who becomes a famous TV personality because of her brilliant cooking and on-screen charisma.Penélope Cruz will also be seen in Billy Bob Thorton's new film, All the Pretty Horses, where she plays an aristocratic Mexican woman who falls in love with an American drifter played by Matt Damon. Persistent rumors indicate the romance is not fictitious at all.At press time, she was negotiating to star with Tom Cruise in Paramount Pictures' Vanilla Sky, and had recently completed Captain Correlli's Mandolin for Universal Pictures/Miramax.

Her list of Spanish credits also include Jamón, Jamón; the Oscar-winning foreign film Belle Epoque, the film that turned her into Spain's leading female actress; and Almodóvar's All About My Mother, where she plays a nun who falls in love with an AIDS-infected man and then dies from the disease. Penélope Cruz Sánchez was born in Madrid, Spain, on April 28, 1974. Her father, Eduardo, was a retailer, and her mother a hairdresser. They named their daughter Penélope after a song written by Spanish singer/composer Joan Manuel Serrat. The couple has two other children, Eduardo Jr. and Mónica. Penélope had a romance with Nacho Cano, member of the group Mecano, with whom she lived until they broke up and she moved in with fellow actor Gigi Sarrasola, but that romance also enden.

Antonio Banderas

In 1982, Banderas began his fruitful association with eccentric writer/director PEDRO ALMODOVAR. 'Labyrinth of Passion' was the beginning of a mutually rewarding partnership that spawned such unforgettable releases as 'Matador' (with its "jaw-dropping" opening sequence), 'Law of Desire,' 'Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown' and 'Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!'

The box office success of 'Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown' and 'Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!' piqued Hollywood's interest in the Latin sensation. He crossed over to American pictures in 1992, playing a young Cuban musician in 'The Mambo Kings.' At the time he was cast, Banderas spoke no English and had to learn all of his dialogue phonetically.

Despite the language barrier, the role provided the jump-start Antonio needed. He was cast opposite TOM HANKS in the 1993 Oscar?-winner 'Philadelphia,' then went on to take a bite out of the big screen -- and some innocent victims -- with fellow blood-suckers BRAD PITT and TOM CRUISE in the 1994 blockbuster, 'Interview with the Vampire.' His other early credits include 'The House of Spirits' (starring MERYL STREEP, GLENN CLOSE and WINONA RYDER) and 'Miami Rhapsody' (SARAH JESSICA PARKER).