Picking just one woman to take the crown of allurement is a daunting task and usually a conversation asking for heavy scrutiny. Nonetheless, Esquire has made up its collective mind and named Oscar winner Penelope Cruz as their “Sexiest Woman Alive” in their November 2014.
At just 40-years-old, Cruz has accomplished a lot outside of the acting world. She is a happily married woman with two children, a world traveling philanthropist and cultural icon in not only her home country of Spain but France as well.
The term “sexy” applies much beneath the surface here.
Via Esquire:
Penélope Cruz lifts her perfect eyebrows from her bottomless brown eyes at the mention of Sunday’s entertainment. “The bullfights?” she says. “The bullfights?” she says again, as though she has never heard the word. Her mouth turns down at its corners.
She is impossibly beautiful. When she walks into a room, men start walking into furniture. Up close, however, she becomes almost hard to look at, like staring into the most unflattering mirror. When we meet strangers, we begin scanning their faces for their strengths and vulnerabilities, for the lights and scars that will tell us something about who they are and the life they have lived. Cruz has no physical flaws, the bent noses and crooked teeth we would normally use as signifiers. Her face contains no secrets, at least not about her. But her face tells you and the room plenty about you. If you want to feel like the world’s most judged man, sit down at a table in a restaurant with the Sexiest Woman Alive.
Over the course of a long lunch, Cruz looks like a thousand different women. She flips her hair, or she shifts in her chair, or she creases her forehead or widens her eyes, and these alone are enough to transform her. It feels like watching close-up magic, an actress playing every possible part and well enough to be confounding.
“I’ve played a lot of tricks on myself,” she says. “I’ve made it hard for me sometimes, especially in my teens and twenties. I had an attraction to drama. Most of us have that, especially if you are an artist—you feel like you are tempted to explore the darkness. I could not be less interested now. For me, the most attractive, charming, cool, fun, interesting thing—how could I call it? A plan.”
Scroll through the gallery below to see why the publication is very confident in their choice this year. While she is quite the looker, let us know if there is anyone you would have favored over the Spanish star in the gallery below.
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Photo: Esquire/Nico
