Joy in joining Almodovar's elite 'family' of actors

While actresses all over the English-speaking world crave to work with Woody Allen - he gives them the juiciest parts without the need to wear leather and wield an Uzi - in Spain all the best women want a role in the next movie directed by Pedro Almodovar.

In the 1980s and early 90s Almodovar turned Carmen Maura into an art-house superstar, culminating in the giddy ensemble comedy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown; then Victoria Abril became one of the hottest properties in Europe with the sexy, controversial Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!; and, most famously, he transformed Penelope Cruz from a face and body into a major actress with All About My Mother, Volver and Broken Embraces.

Almodovar's latest "discovery" (more about that in a moment) is Elena Anaya, a feline firecracker who has been getting as much attention for her powerhouse performance in The Skin I Live In as a kidnapped woman trying to hang on to her identity while undergoing a radically transformative medical procedures conducted by her captor, a suave, Victor Frankenstein-like plastic surgeon played by Antonio Banderas.

Anaya, 36, is hardly a newcomer. She already has a substantial body of work in Europe and abroad, putting in dazzling turns in the Spanish erotic classic Sex and Lucia and as a gangster's moll in the hit French crime drama Mesrine and adding badly needed sizzle to the Hugh Jackman vampire-hunter dud Van Helsing.

Despite her career ticking over nicely, when Anaya got a phone call from Almodovar to star alongside Banderas in The Skin I Live In, she was overwhelmed, as if the door to a magical kingdom had been opened and she was invited in.

"It was the biggest, biggest, biggest joy of my life," Anaya tells me over the phone from Madrid where she now lives after leaving her small town of Palencia in the north-west of Spain to pursue an acting career.

"But the moment Pedro told me that I had the part of Vera my head filled with all these dark thoughts. Can I do this? Am I good enough! ? If I m ess up an Almodovar film I would have to hide for the rest of my life. But then I said to myself, 'I'd better not think about that'."

Thinking, however, is what Almodovar wants his actors to do (not to mention his audience, who get more ideas to chew over in any five minutes of one of the Spanish maestro's movies than in a dozen summertime blockbusters).

After he had completed the screenplay, based on a pulpy 1984 novella by Frenchman Thierry Jonquet, Almodovar got Anaya into his office and talked non-stop "for five or six hours" about the storyline, the characters and the cinematic and cultural references, which include Hitchcock and Bunuel, Frankenstein and Peeping Tom, Prometheus and Galatea, Dolce & Gabanna.

And before the shoot Almodovar encouraged her to read Alice Munro's short story collection Runaway and the autobiographies of New Zealand author Janet Frame (the basis of Jane Campion's An Angel At My Table). He saw Vera as a survivor and The Skin I Live In about the importance of hanging on to the sense of self no matter what happens to your exterior.

"I could talk to you for hours about the notes he gave me," Anaya told London's Observer newspaper. "With Pedro you don't build up your own role. You have to almost go through his mind to get to the character. Every little moment he directs you and you have to be obedient and quick to follow his path to wherever he wants to take you."

Indeed, Anaya was so concerned about working with Almodovar, who now reigns over European art-house cinema in the manner of Bergman and Fellini in their heyday, that she rang her old friend Penelope Cruz, considered to be the director's muse (a role Anaya is now challenging her for after the success of The Skin I Live In).

Anaya says Cruze gave her great advice for working with Almodovar. "Just be very obedient and don't make him mad."

Working on The Skin I Live In also gave Anaya the opportunity to see up close the reunion of the director and Banderas, whose Hollywood car! eer was launched off the back of a series of sizzling collaborations with Almodovar, culminating in the divisive kidnap comedy Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

"They haven't worked together for 20 years and one lives in America, the other in Spain. But it was like they had never been apart," recalls Anaya, who had a blink-or-you'll-miss-it part in Almodovar's 2002 masterpiece Talk To Her.

"They grew up together, they are good friends, they belong to the same family, in a way. I love them both," says Anaya, who is now a regular companion of Almodovar at fashion shows and courtside watching Rafael Nadal. For Almodovar it is all about his family, of which Elena Anaya is now a member.

The Skin I Live In is now screening.