EXCLUSIVE: How Matthew McConaughey took Penelope Cruz to Mexico in his Airstream and then dumped her for Camila Alves, grew back his hair after going bald and got busted with his bong and bongos
Tall, tanned and often bare-chested, the six-foot-tall movie star from Texas, Matthew McConaughey, was just another beefcake actor starring in vacuous romantic and coming-of-age comedies that kept the money flowing in.
With the help of a seductive smile and hard abs, he had a string of affairs with Hollywood leading ladies – Sandra Bullock, Ashley Judd, Renee Zellweger, Patricia Arquette... and Penelope Cruz
'There's a bit of a language barrier, but it's like poetry when it happens,' he said of Cruz. 'What I really love about her is that she sees everything for the first time, every time. And she's one of the best listeners I've ever met.'
They drove to Mexico together in his Airstream trailer.
But then another woman stopped him dead in his tracks.
Hanging out in the Hyde Lounge club on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood in 2006 with his pal, now-disgraced cyclist, Lance Armstrong, he saw the woman of his dreams. And she changed his life forever writes Neil Daniels in Matthew McConaughey: The Biography, published by John Blake.
McConaughey's relationship with sexy Penelope Cruz was over as soon as he spotted the 5'9' tall Brazilian model Camila Alves enter the Hyde bar.
'The first time I saw her walk across the room, I didn't say, "Who is that?" I said, "What is that?"
'The way she moved, I could see a person who knows who they are. There's a person who spends time with herself, and is not advertising for this world, and is not asking permission. From that night I haven't been on a date with anyone else'.
It was a year and a half before they dated exclusively.
And it set McConaughey, 45, on the path towards achieving what he considered his greatest accomplishment - being a father.
'When I was 20 years old, I didn't know what I wanted for a career. But I knew I wanted to be a father. It had been the thing that, since I was very young, I looked up to. The men I looked up to the most were fathers – men who raised good kids'.
Two years later, in July 2008, the couple had their first of three children and became engaged in 2011.
McConaughey put a rose-cut diamond on Camila's finger and married her in June of 2012 in a Catholic ceremony presided over by a Benedictine Monk.
Alves, 33, first landed in Los Angeles from Brazil when she was fifteen. She cleaned houses and worked as a waitress before hanging up her feather duster to become a successful model for Dior and Levi's.
When the couple first lived together, it was in an Airstream trailer, a love of McConaughey's who now owns three of them.
When he goes on location, they travel in an Airstream.
'We all go together,' Alves says. 'One thing that we decided very early in the relationship is that when he goes, we all go – the whole family.
'We're like a traveling circus. But we're never in one place for too long. We're always on the go. We've been on the road for four years'.
Before Camilla, the tall Texas was viewed as a bongo-playing, bong-toking free spirit who loved to play those drums in the nude while stoned on weed.
In 1999, the knock on his door was the police responding to the neighbor's noise complaint. They found him stoned and naked with a bong nearby.
He resisted arrest and was hauled off to jail for resisting as well as on a marijuana possession.
The charges were dropped eventually but he had to pay a fifty dollar fine for disturbing the peace, a mere drop in the bucket for the actor who was then earning $4 million a film.
He sang sing-alongs with his cellmates and even had T-shirts printed that read, 'What part of naked bongo playing don't you understand'?
Naked was something he learned growing up when his mother never put bathing suits on him or his brothers while at the country club before they were nine years old.
Three years earlier in 1996, Vanity Fair's annual Hollywood issue dubbed McConaughey the new Paul Newman. The New York Times compared him to Gregory Peck and the writer John Grisham viewed him as a cross between a young Marlon Brando and Paul Newman.
McConaughey's career almost tanked when he lost out on the Titanic role to Leonardo DiCaprio.
But it was all 'alright, alright, alright', with the actor whose phone didn't stop ringing after he verbalized the character's lines in the cult film Dazed and Confused in 1993 that kept Hollywood producers calling and scripts for rom-coms coming in.
