Catherine Zeta-Jones

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Catherine Zeta-Jones
CBE

Zeta-Jones at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival.

Catherine Zeta Jones
Born
25 September 1969 (age 46)
Swansea, Wales
Residence Bedford, New York, United States
Nationality Welsh
Occupation Actress
Years active 1981present
Spouse(s)
Michael Douglas (m. 2000)
Children
2
Awards
See below
Website
Catherinezetajones.com
Catherine Zeta-Jones, CBE (/zit/; born Catherine Zeta Jones; 25 September 1969) is a
Welsh actress.[1][2][3] She has received critical acclaim and numerous accolades throughout
her career, including one Academy Award, one BAFTA Award, and three Screen Actor Guild
Awards. She was named Hasty Pudding's Woman of the Year in 2005, and was
appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2010 Birthday
Honours.[4]

Zeta-Jones began her acting career at age 12, with the lead role in the stage musical Annie,
and subsequently pursued a career on theatre with appearances in productions, such
as West End's42nd Street. She made her movie debut in the 1991 French fantasy
feature Les 1001 nuits and continued her film work with supporting roles in Christopher
Columbus: The Discovery (1992) andSplitting Heirs (1993), while starring in
the ITV series The Darling Buds of May from 1991 until 1993. She established her early film
career in the United Kingdom and eventually transitioned intoHollywood mainstream movies,
appearing in the action western The Mask of Zorro (1998) and the crime
thriller Entrapment (1999), both of which were international commercial successes. Her
performance in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000) earned her significant critical praise and
her firstGolden Globe Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress Motion Picture.
Zeta-Jones starred as Velma Kelly in the film adaptation of the musical Chicago (2002),
another critical and commercial success. For the film, she received the Academy Award and
the British Academy Film Award for Best Supporting Actress, plus two Screen Actors Guild
Awards and her second Golden Globe Award nomination, for Best Actress Motion Picture
Musical or Comedy. She then appeared in the romantic comedy Intolerable Cruelty (2003),
the crime film Ocean's Twelve(2004) and reprised her starring role in the sequel of the 1998
film, The Legend of Zorro (2005). Parts in the smaller-scale features Death Defying
Acts (2008) and The Rebound (2009) were followed by a 3-year hiatus from screen acting.
During that time, she returned to the stage and portrayed Desiree inA Little Night
Music (2010), for which she won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical.[5]She
has since done further film work in the musical comedy Rock of Ages and the psychological
thriller Side Effects (2013).

Contents
[hide]

1 Early life
2 Career
2.1 1980s90s: Early acting credits
2.2 19982004: Mainstream success
2.3 200511: Career hiatus and theatre
2.4 2012present: Further film work

 3 Image and media

4 Personal life
4.1 Marriage
4.2 Health
5 Filmography
6 Other credits
7 Awards and nominations
8 References
9 External links

Early life[edit]
Catherine Zeta-Jones was born in Swansea on 25 September 1969,[6] to David Jones, a
sweet-factory owner,[6][7][8] and his wife Patricia (ne Fair), a seamstress.[9] Her father is
of Welsh descent, and her mother is of Welsh and Irish ancestry.[10] She was named after her
grandmothers, Zeta Jones and Catherine Fair. She has two brothers who both help with
her production company, Milkwood Films.[11]
Zeta-Jones grew up in the prosperous Swansea suburb of Mumbles. At the age of five, she
was sent to the Hazel Johnson School of Dance to make use of her energy. By the time she
was 11, she was a British tap-dancing champion.[12] She was educated at Dumbarton House
School, a co-educational independent school in Swansea, but left early to further her acting
ambitions without obtaining O-levels.[13] She then attended the independent Arts Educational
Schools in Chiswick, London, for a full-time, three-year course in Musical Theatre.[14]

Career[edit]
1980s90s: Early acting credits[edit]
Zeta-Jones made her professional acting debut when she played the lead in Annie, a
production at Swansea Grand Theatre. When she was 14, Zeta-Jones was cast as Tallulah in
theatre production of Bugsy Malone, and at age 17, she had a part in the chorus of The
Pajama Game at theHaymarket Theatre, Leicester starring Paul Jones and Fiona Hendley.
The show subsequently toured the United Kingdom, and in 1987, she starred in 42nd
Street as Peggy Sawyer at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.[15] She was cast in the leading role
after both the actress playing Peggy Sawyer and her understudy fell ill. She also played Mae
Jones in the Kurt Weill opera Street Scene with the English National Opera at the
LondonColiseum Theatre in 1989. After the show closed, she travelled to France where she
played the lead role in French director Philippe de Broca's Les 1001 Nuits (1990), her feature
film debut. Her singing and dancing ability suggested a promising future but it was in a
straight acting role as Mariette in the popular ITV period drama The Darling Buds of
May (19911993), an adaptation of H. E. Bates' novel of the same name that brought her to

public attention and made her a British tabloid darling; [15][16] "Literally, with one hour of
television my life completely changed. I couldn't go anywhere", she once told USA
Weekend magazine about her celebrity status in the United Kingdom due to her part in the
show.
She briefly flirted with a musical career, beginning with a part in the 1992 album Jeff Wayne's
Musical Version of Spartacus, from which the single "For All Time" was released in 1992. It
reached No. 36 in the UK charts. She went on to release the singles "In the Arms of Love", "I
Can't Help Myself", and a duet with David Essex "True Love Ways", reaching No. 38 in the UK
singles chart in 1994.[17] Around that time, she starred in an episode of the American
television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (19921993)[15] as well as in the
film Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992).[18] In 1990, Zeta-Jones participated in a
television commercial for the German Deutsche Bahn at the age of 21, playing the part of a
young woman eloping with her lover from a joyless marriage, a role which apparently helped
in promoting her acting career.[19] She continued to find moderate success with a number of
television projects, including The Return of the Native (1994) based on the novel of the same
name(1878) by Thomas Hardy and the miniseries Catherine the Great.[20] She also appeared
in Splitting Heirs (1993), a comedy film starring Eric Idle,Rick Moranis and John Cleese. In
1996, she was cast as the evil aviatrix Sala in the action film The Phantom, based on the
comic by Lee Falk.[21]The following year, she co-starred in the CBS miniseries Titanic (1996),
which also starred Peter Gallagher, Tim Curry and George C. Scott.[15]

19982004: Mainstream success[edit]

Steven Spielberg, who noted her performance in the miniseries Titanic (1996), recommended
her to Martin Campbell, the director of The Mask of Zorro (1998).[22] Zeta-Jones subsequently
landed a lead role in the film, alongside Welsh compatriot Anthony Hopkins and Antonio
Banderas. She studied dancing, riding, sword-fighting and took part in dialect classes to play
her role as Elena.[22] The movie was released in the United States on 17 July 1998 to critical
and financial success ( with a 83% Rotten Tomatoes rating and a US$250.2 million worldwide
gross).[23][24] For her part, the actress was brought to a much wider recognition and earned
critical and popular praise; commenting on her performance, Variety noted, "Zeta-Jones is
bewitchingly lovely as the center of everyone's attention, and she throws herself into the often
physical demands of her role with impressive grace." [25] She nabbed the Blockbuster
Entertainment Award for Favorite Female Newcomer and was nominated for the Female
Breakthrough Performance award at the 1999 MTV Movie Awards. She also scored Empire
Award and Saturn Award nominations for The Mask of Zorro.

At the 52nd Cannes Film Festival premiere ofEntrapment, on May 1, 1999.

Her first release of 1999 was the caper film Entrapment, where she co-starred with Sean
Connery, portraying an insurance agent named Virginia Baker, who is sent by her employer to
track down and help capture an art thief. A box office success, the movie came out to moslty
polarizing reviews, but Zeta-Jones rated favorably with critics. [26][27][28] Roger Ebert noted that
she played "a preposterous role absolutely straight", [29] and Washington Post called on
viewers to "appreciate what she brings to the movie". [30] Despite the positive reaction towards
Catherine, she later received a Golden Raspberry Award nomination for Worst Actress. Later
that year, she appeared alongside Liam Neeson and Lili Taylor in The Haunting. It was a
remake of the classic 1963 movie of the same name about a team of paranormal experts who
look into strange occurrences in an ill-fated mansion. Upon its release, the horror feature was
generally critical panned but performed well commercially, with US$177.3 million made
worldwide.[31][32] She nabbed other Razzie Award nomination due to her rolefor Worst
Screen Couple(shared with Taylor).[33]
In 2000, Zeta-Jones starred in Steven Soderbergh's critically acclaimed Traffic, where her role
was Helena Ayala, the wife of a drug lord named Carlos Ayala (played by Steven Bauer). The
picture also featured her real life husband Michael Douglas; through they were engaged
when principal photography took place, none shared screen time. As she was pregnant at the
time with her first child, her role in the movie was adjusted to suit her condition. [34] Originally,
her character was already a mother of two instead of an expecting one. Eager to work with
director Soderbergh, she suggested to play her part pregnant as "it would give the character a
vulnerability and would also up the stakes for her". [35] Traffic was highly profitable at the box
office and earned praise from the press, [36][37] with the critic for the Dallas Observer calling the
movie "a remarkable achievement in filmmaking, a beautiful and brutal work". [38] Along with
the cast, she won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a
Motion Picture and scored her first Golden Globenomination, in the category of Best
Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture. [39]
She then headlined America's Sweethearts (2001), a romantic comedy film also starring Julia
Roberts, Billy Crystal and John Cusack, where she portrayed a film star named Gwen
Harrison. The film came out to moslty mediocre and average reviews, [40][41] with Los Angeles

Weekly stating that the film "isn't just banal, it's aggressively, arrogantly banal." [42] However, it
was a hit at the box office grossing over US$138 million worldwide.[43] The following year,
Zeta-Jones played murderous vaudevillian Velma Kelly in the film adaptation of the Broadway
musical Chicago. It was commercial success, grossing more than US$306 million worldwide,
[44] and received universal acclaim. [45] Her performance was widely praised by critics as
well; Seattle Post-Intelligencer felt that the actress "makes a wonderfully statuesque and
bitchy saloon goddess",[46] and Slatewrote in its verdict that she has "a smoldering confidence
that takes your mind off her not always fluid dancing although she's a perfectly fine
hoofer, with majestic limbs and a commanding cleavage". [47] The movie earned her the Best
Supporting Actress award at the 75th Academy Awards and the 56th BAFTA Awards, plus
two Screen Actors Guild Awards: for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a
Supporting Roleand as a cast member for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion
Picture.