Catherine Zeta-Jones

• 1. Introduction

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  Catherine Zeta-Jones once said that with one hour of television, her life completely changed and she could not go anywhere. She is a Welsh actress, born in Swansea on the 25th of September 1969. The Zeta in her name is pronounced ZEE-tuh. That hour of television was only one turning point in a career that moved between theatre, cinema and streaming. Her story raises a few questions. How does a child from a family with a sweet factory in a Welsh city reach Broadway and Hollywood? Why did she move to Los Angeles when British television had already made her face familiar? And what happens when a performer's image becomes public property, and she decides to fight for control of it?

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• 2. Swansea Roots

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  David Jones owned a sweet factory in Swansea, and his wife Patricia, born Fair, worked as a seamstress. Their daughter Catherine was born into that household, in the Treboeth area of the city. Her father was Welsh, and her mother was of Irish Catholic descent. She had two brothers. David was older, and Lyndon was younger and later moved from sales work into film production. Her name came from her two grandmothers, Zeta Jones and Catherine Fair. The name Zeta had itself been taken from a ship that her great-grandfather sailed on.

  At the age of four, Catherine was sent to the Hazel Johnson School of Dance, because her mother found her a hyperactive child. A bingo win of £100,000 then changed the family's circumstances. The Joneses moved from Treboeth to the Mumbles area of Swansea, and the money paid for dance and ballet lessons. Catherine also attended Dumbarton House School, a private school in the city.

  A rendition of a Shirley Bassey song won her the Junior Star Trail talent competition and brought her local press attention. As part of a dance troupe, she made regular trips to London to audition for theatre roles. At age nine she was chosen to play July, one of the orphan girls, in the original West End production of Annie. In her early teens she became a national tap-dancing champion. In 1981 she played the title role in Annie at the Swansea Grand Theatre. Two years later she played Tallulah in a West End production of Bugsy Malone.

  At fifteen, Zeta-Jones left school without any O-levels and moved to London to act full time. She later described her method in those years: "I would queue up for auditions and then change my costume or put on a different leotard and audition again. It might take me two tries, but I always got the job. I figured out what they wanted". She went on to a three-year musical theatre course at the independent Arts Educational Schools, in the Chiswick district of London. From November 1985 to January 1986 she was a company member in The Pajama Game at the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester.

  In 1987, seventeen-year-old Zeta-Jones was the second understudy for the lead in a West End production of 42nd Street. One night the star and the first understudy were both unavailable, so she was asked to play Peggy Sawyer, a chorus girl who becomes a star. The producer was impressed and let her keep the part for the next two years. In 1989 she joined the English National Opera at the London Coliseum, playing Mae Jones in Kurt Weill's Street Scene. Her first film role was only a year away.

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• 3. Small Screen Fame

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  Philippe de Broca directed Zeta-Jones in her film debut, 1001 Nights, in 1990. The French-Italian production retold the Arabic fable One Thousand and One Nights from the viewpoint of Scheherazade, one of the brides of King Sharir. Zeta-Jones played Scheherazade, and Thierry Lhermitte played the king. The film did poorly at the box office. According to de Broca's obituary in The Daily Telegraph, it is "best remembered for its enjoyable nude scenes."

  The ITV series The Darling Buds of May, which ran from 1991 to 1993, brought a far bigger success. She starred alongside David Jason and Pam Ferris as the eldest daughter of a countryside family in 1950s Britain, in an adaptation of a novel by H. E. Bates. At the time it was the highest-rated television show in the country, and the public came to know her face.

  In 1992 she had a brief part as Beatriz Enríquez de Arana in the unsuccessful adventure film Christopher Columbus: The Discovery. That same year she appeared as a belly dancer in disguise in an episode of George Lucas's series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. In 1993 she played an aspiring duchess in Splitting Heirs, a farcical period comedy directed by Robert Young. Eric Idle and Rick Moranis played two children separated at birth. Reviews were negative, although Vincent Canby of The New York Times found her "very funny".

  Thomas Hardy's 1878 novel The Return of the Native became a television film in 1994, with Zeta-Jones as the melancholic Eustacia Vye. That year she also played the wife of Lloyd Owen's character in the war drama The Cinder Path. In 1995 she took the title role in the television biopic Catherine the Great. Lisa Nesselson of Variety called it wooden and hollow, though she credited Zeta-Jones with "a certain grace and resolve". Also in 1995 came Blue Juice, publicised as Britain's first surf film, in which she played the pragmatic girlfriend of Sean Pertwee's character. Leonard Maltin dismissed it as "superficial and predictable".

  Zeta-Jones grew unhappy at being typecast as the token pretty girl in British films, and she moved to Los Angeles. She explained: "There was all this fuss about who I was and wasn't dating. I was a pretty face and a big bust and nothing else. People in the business believed what they read about me. So I decided to move away and start again." She believed that being unknown in America helped her win roles on merit rather than on her public image.

  In 1996 she played Sala, the henchwoman of the villain Drax, played by Treat Williams, in the superhero film The Phantom, with Billy Zane in the title role. A reviewer for Variety thought she stood out, but the film was poorly reviewed and earned little. The CBS miniseries Titanic, also from 1996, was better received. She played the lead, Isabella Paradine, a young mother who has an extramarital affair aboard the RMS Titanic, opposite Peter Gallagher and George C. Scott.

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• 4. Hollywood Years

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  Steven Spielberg noticed Zeta-Jones in the Titanic miniseries and recommended her to Martin Campbell. Campbell was directing The Mask of Zorro (1998) for Spielberg's company, Amblin Entertainment. He cast her as the leading lady in place of Izabella Scorupco, who had been his first choice. The film starred Anthony Hopkins and Antonio Banderas, and she played Elena, the lost daughter of Hopkins's Zorro. She saw similarities between her own "volatile" Celtic personality and her Latin character's temperament. To prepare, she learned dancing, riding and sword-fighting, and she took Spanish diction lessons. Shooting action and dance scenes in heavy corsets in the dry Mexican desert was hard, but she called it "worth suffering for". The film was well reviewed and grossed over $250 million worldwide. It earned her an MTV Movie Award nomination for Best Breakthrough Performance.

  Entrapment (1999) paired her with Sean Connery, with Zeta-Jones as a seductive insurance agent tracking an art thief. Critics were negative, but it was a commercial success. Janet Maslin of The New York Times said it let her show off her "slithery skills". Later that year she joined Liam Neeson and Lili Taylor in The Haunting, a remake of a 1963 film about paranormal investigators in a haunted mansion. Reviews were generally poor, yet it found a large audience worldwide. Mick LaSalle wrote that she "seems less an actress and more a pretty face, and not an interesting one at that".

  High Fidelity (2000) gave her a supporting part as the former romantic interest of John Cusack's lead character. She then starred in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000), an ensemble thriller about drug abuse that also featured Michael Douglas and Benicio del Toro. She played Helena, the wife of a drug lord, who takes over the business when he is arrested. The role was first written as a mother of two. Soderbergh rewrote it as a pregnant woman at Zeta-Jones's suggestion, to fit her own pregnancy. The film was highly profitable and critically acclaimed, and the Dallas Observer called it "a beautiful and brutal work". Edward Guthman of the San Francisco Chronicle called her "sensational" in a scene where Helena confronts a Tijuana dealer. The ensemble won the SAG Award for Outstanding Cast. Her Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress was the first of two she would receive.

  America's Sweethearts was her only film of 2001. She played a shrewd film star opposite Julia Roberts, who played her character's under-confident sibling. Roger Ebert thought she was aptly "chilly and manipulative". In 2002 she played the murderous nightclub singer Velma Kelly in Chicago, directed by Rob Marshall. She modelled Velma's look and mannerisms on the actress Louise Brooks. The script gave the character no backstory, so she tried to show "flamboyance" and "desperation" through "little looks and nuances". William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer called her a statuesque saloon goddess. David Edelstein of Slate said her smouldering confidence made him forget that her dancing was not always fluid, and he singled out her "All That Jazz". Chicago grossed $306 million worldwide and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Zeta-Jones won the Academy Award, the SAG Award and the BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actress, among other honours.

  In 2003 she voiced Princess Marina in the animated Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, with Brad Pitt as Sinbad. She took the job so that her young children could hear her and sense her on film. The film was a box office bomb. That year she also starred opposite George Clooney in the Coen brothers' black comedy Intolerable Cruelty, as a serial divorcée drawn to a divorce lawyer. It was a commercial success, and Damon Wise of Empire praised her for "old-school quickfire patter".

  In 2004 Spielberg approached her for The Terminal, in which Tom Hanks is trapped at JFK International Airport. She played an insecure air hostess, and Spielberg wanted her to play against type, as a strong-willed woman with a vulnerable side. A. O. Scott felt the film used her looks rather than her self-mocking wit. It did well commercially. She then reunited with Soderbergh for Ocean's Twelve, a sequel to Ocean's Eleven (2001), alongside Clooney, Pitt and Roberts. She played Isabel Lahiri, a Europol agent and the love interest of Pitt's character. Paul Clinton of CNN said her sex appeal helped, while Ken Tucker of New York magazine thought her character was redundant. The film divided critics but grossed over $360 million globally.

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• 5. Stage And Sabbaticals

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  The Legend of Zorro arrived in 2005 as a sequel to The Mask of Zorro, with Zeta-Jones again opposite Banderas as Elena. Set ten years after the first film, it follows Elena as she struggles with married life. Critics disliked it, and it disappointed commercially. She had no film releases in 2006. Death Defying Acts followed in 2007. It was a Harry Houdini biopic starring Guy Pearce, and she played a Scottish con artist who claims psychic powers. It received only a limited theatrical release.

  No Reservations, also from 2007, remade the German film Mostly Martha (2001). Zeta-Jones played an ambitious chef whose life improves when she takes in her young niece, played by Abigail Breslin, after her sister dies. Aaron Eckhart co-starred. To prepare, she worked in the kitchen and waited on tables at Fiamma Osteria in New York. Claudia Puig of USA Today said she "shines" in the role. Roger Ebert disliked the film but still found her "convincing". It grossed $92 million worldwide and was her last commercial success of the decade.

  After No Reservations, Zeta-Jones sharply reduced her workload for five years, choosing to focus on her family and her health. The few projects she accepted were smaller and less successful. In The Rebound she played a forty-year-old mother attracted to a younger man, played by Justin Bartha. The film reached cinemas outside the United States in 2009-10. Its distributor, The Film Development, ran into financial trouble, and the film never opened theatrically in America.

  Broadway offered a different kind of return in 2009. A revival of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music marked her Broadway debut. The musical is set in Sweden in the early twentieth century, and she played Desirée Armfeldt, an ageing actress, in a company that included Angela Lansbury and Alexander Hanson. She said the piece appealed to her because of its depth: "There's no jazzy hands, no high kicks, no fishnet stockings,... It's not one of those shows where you can dig about three inches and come out the other end. You can keep digging and digging and digging". She avoided earlier recordings of the songs so that her interpretation would be her own. Claire Prentice of The Daily Telegraph praised the "quiet, reflective poignancy" of her "Send In the Clowns". Emma Brockes of The Guardian was harsher, saying she seemed to be auditioning for stage school. Zeta-Jones won the Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award for Best Actress in a Musical.

  After a three-year break from acting, she came back to the screen in Lay the Favorite (2012). She played the jealous wife of a gambler, played by Bruce Willis, and Rebecca Hall co-starred. Betsy Sharkey of the Los Angeles Times found her "far too shrill to amuse". In the ensemble musical comedy Rock of Ages, with Tom Cruise and Bryan Cranston, she played a religiously conservative mayor's wife. She was attracted to playing a "nightmare of a woman" and based the role on the politician Michele Bachmann. The film received mixed reviews and failed commercially. Her last release of 2012 was Playing for Keeps, a romantic comedy with Gerard Butler. It was her third box office failure of the year.

  In 2013 she led the crime thriller Broken City, with Mark Wahlberg and Russell Crowe. Wahlberg played a private detective hired by the mayor of New York City, played by Crowe, to spy on the mayor's wife. Todd McCarthy thought she nicely underplayed the part. The film was not widely seen. Her third collaboration with Soderbergh, the thriller Side Effects (2013), changed that. She played a mysterious psychiatrist who recommends an antidepressant with serious side effects, alongside Channing Tatum, Jude Law and Rooney Mara. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called her "dynamite".

  Red 2 (2013), an action comedy about retired spies, cast her as Katja, a seductive Russian double agent, with Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren and Mary-Louise Parker. She liked its action, humour and tongue-in-cheek tone. Its worldwide gross of $148 million made it her most widely seen film since No Reservations. She then took another sabbatical, saying: "If I'm going to leave my family for any length of time it had better be for a role that I haven't played before, otherwise I would prefer to stay at home". The role she found was in Dad's Army (2016), a British war comedy based on the television sitcom. She played a glamorous journalist reporting on a Home Guard platoon in Walmington-on-Sea, with Bill Nighy and Toby Jones. Catherine Bray of Variety called the film an "amiable but creaky resurrection" of the sitcom and thought Zeta-Jones was generally underused.

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• 6. Television Second Act

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  Ryan Murphy's anthology drama Feud brought Zeta-Jones back to television in 2017. Its first season, subtitled Bette and Joan, dramatised the rivalry between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, played by Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon. Zeta-Jones played Olivia de Havilland. Sonia Saraiya of Variety credited her with the best turn in the show. De Havilland, then 101, objected to the unauthorised use of her name and identity and sued the network and producers for invasion of privacy and other personality rights. A California appellate court later dismissed the lawsuit.

  In 2018 she played the drug lord Griselda Blanco in the Lifetime television film Cocaine Godmother. Despite the character's misdeeds, she admired Blanco's fortitude and her ability to stand out in a male-dominated business. Hanh Nguyen of IndieWire criticised casting her as a Latino woman, calling her performance "outlandish". She next led the Facebook Watch comedy-drama Queen America as Vicki Ellis, an unrelenting pageant coach. Ellis has bulimia, and Zeta-Jones drew on her teenage encounters with dancers who had eating disorders. Jen Chaney of Vulture wrote that she is at her best when fiery, and that the part gave her plenty of chances to shift into "beast mode".

  In 2021 she took a recurring role in the second season of the Fox drama Prodigal Son. She played Dr. Vivian Capshaw opposite Michael Sheen. The series was cancelled after that season. In 2022 she appeared as Morticia Addams in two episodes of the Netflix fantasy series Wednesday. Dave Nemetz of TVLine found her "exquisitely well-cast" in the small part. Within three weeks of its release, Wednesday became the second most-watched English-language Netflix series.

  She also played the main antagonist in the Disney+ adventure series National Treasure: Edge of History. Joshua Alston of Variety called her the "best thing" about the show. He added that her villainy came so close to camp that she seemed to be workshopping a comic impression of her own voice. The role earned her a nomination at the Children's and Family Emmy Awards. In 2025 she returned as Morticia in the second season of Wednesday. Annabel Nugent of The Independent found her "particularly enjoyable", and Ben Travis of Empire called her "excellent". Next on her film slate is The Gallerist, an independent film from Cathy Yan, with Natalie Portman and Jenna Ortega.

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• 7. Marriage And Illness

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  In a 1995 interview with the Daily Mirror, Zeta-Jones described her lifestyle bluntly: "I drink, I swear, I like sex". The success of The Darling Buds of May had made her a celebrity in Britain, and the press followed her private life closely. Her relationships in the early 1990s with the television personality John Leslie, the singer David Essex and the pop star Mick Hucknall were heavily publicised. In the mid-1990s she was briefly engaged to the Scottish actor Angus Macfadyen.

  In August 1998, at the Deauville American Film Festival in France, Danny DeVito introduced her to the American actor Michael Douglas. They shared a birthday, and he was 25 years her senior. They became engaged on the 31st of December 1999. They married at the Plaza Hotel in New York City on the 18th of November 2000, after Douglas's divorce was finalised. He insisted on a pre-nuptial agreement because his first wife, Diandra, had been awarded 60 million USD in their divorce.

  The ceremony cost an estimated £1.5 million, and the BBC labelled it the "wedding of the year". The couple signed a £1 million deal with OK! magazine for photographs, and the rest of the press was kept out. Journalists from Hello! magazine secretly took pictures anyway. The couple sued the publication for invasion of privacy and won.

  Their son Dylan Michael was born in August 2000, and their daughter Carys Zeta in April 2003. The family lived in Bermuda until 2009 and now lives in rural New York state. They also have a coastal estate near Valldemossa in Mallorca. In an interview with The Times, Zeta-Jones said they own four properties, one in Canada, one in Spain and two in New York.

  In 2010 Douglas was diagnosed with tongue cancer, and Zeta-Jones faced an emotionally turbulent time. She said: "When you get sideswiped like that with the illness it's an obvious trigger for your balance to be a little bit off , not sleeping, worry, stress." The strain led to depression. Despite initial apprehension, she made public her diagnosis of bipolar II disorder. She checked into hospital for treatment in 2011 and again in 2013. Because of the stress of both illnesses, the couple decided in 2013 to live separately, without taking any legal step toward separation or divorce. They reconciled in 2014, and Douglas said they were "stronger than ever".

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• 8. Image And Causes

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  In 1998 People magazine placed Zeta-Jones at number one on its "Most Beautiful People" list, and she stayed on the list from 2000 to 2004. In 2003 Esquire called her "the most beautiful woman on the planet". In 2011 a poll by the television network QVC named her the most beautiful British woman. Her early Hollywood work, including The Mask of Zorro and Entrapment, leaned heavily on her sex appeal. She was later appreciated for her versatility.

  In 2010 the journalist Sheila Johnston of The Daily Telegraph called her "the ultimate self-made success". Guy Adams of The Independent saw her as "self-effacing and energetic", with a "steely core" off screen. Satire has also found her. A 2006 episode of the British show Star Stories was titled Catherine Zeta-Jones, Her Quest to Prove Herself... And Also Find Love, and it told a fictitious life story. In a 2004 interview with USA Weekend, she said: "The biggest misconception of me is that I'm some die-hard, ambitious, do-anything-to-get-anything kind of person, I'm not. I'm very shy socially."

  Zeta-Jones guards her likeness closely. Besides the case against Hello!, she sued a Nevada-based topless club for using her image in its advertising. In 2003 the celebrity biographer Cliff Goodwin wrote an unauthorised biography, Catherine Zeta Jones: The Biography. Its publication was postponed indefinitely after her lawyers threatened legal action against both Goodwin and his publisher.

  Her face has also been a commercial asset. In 2002 she became global ambassador for the cosmetics company Elizabeth Arden, Inc. That year T-Mobile signed her for an estimated $10 million per year, which made her the highest-paid celebrity endorser at the time. In 2017 she launched a line of home decoration products called Casa Zeta-Jones.

  Charity has been a steady thread. She is a patron of Swansea's Longfields Day Centre for the disabled, which she has given sizeable donations. In 2001 she auctioned an outfit from The Mask of Zorro to raise funds for AIDS patients in Africa. In 2005 she became ambassador of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and launched the Full Stop appeal in Wales on child abuse. She has also backed the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children and the Noah's Ark Appeal. She is founding host of A Fine Romance, an annual programme that raises money for the Motion Picture & Television Fund, and belongs to the Cinema for Peace Foundation. In 2017 she performed a monologue as a mathematically inclined young girl in The Children's Monologues, which raised funds for Dramatic Need, a charity that helps African children pursue careers in the arts.

  In the early 1990s she also tried singing. In 1992 she voiced the character Palene in Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of Spartacus. In 1994 she sang the duet "True Love Ways" with David Essex. In 1995 she released her first single, "In the Arms of Love", on Wayne's Wow! Records.

  Queen Elizabeth II appointed her a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2010 Birthday Honours, for her film and charity work. In 2019 her home city awarded her the Freedom of the City of Swansea. That city will also be the setting for her next television project. She is to star in and executive produce the Prime Video thriller series Kill Jackie, adapted from Nick Harkaway's novel The Price You Pay, and it will be filmed in Swansea.

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