Catherine Zeta-Jones (; born 25 September 1969) is a Welsh actress. She has received various accolades, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, and a Tony Award. In 2010, she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her film and humanitarian work.
Born and raised in Swansea, Zeta-Jones aspired to be an actress from a young age. As a child, she played roles in the West End productions of the musicals Annie and Bugsy Malone. She studied musical theatre at the Arts Educational Schools, London, and made her stage breakthrough with a leading role in a 1987 production of 42nd Street. Her screen debut came in the unsuccessful French-Italian film 1001 Nights (1990), and went on to find greater success as a regular in the British television series The Darling Buds of May (1991–1993). Dismayed at being typecast as the token pretty girl in British films, Zeta-Jones relocated to Los Angeles. She established herself in Hollywood with roles that highlighted her sex appeal, such as in the action film The Mask of Zorro (1998) and the heist film Entrapment (1999).
Zeta-Jones received critical acclaim for her performances as a vengeful pregnant woman in Traffic (2000) and Velma Kelly in the musical Chicago (2002), winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the latter. She starred in high-profile films for much of the decade, including the black comedy Intolerable Cruelty (2003), the heist film Ocean's Twelve (2004), the comedy The Terminal (2004), and the romantic comedy No Reservations (2007). Parts in smaller-scale features were followed by a decrease in workload, during which she returned to the stage and played an aging actress in a Broadway production of A Little Night Music (2009), winning the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. Zeta-Jones worked intermittently in the subsequent decades, starring in the films Side Effects (2013), Red 2 (2013), and Dad's Army (2016). She took on supporting roles in television, portraying Olivia de Havilland in Feud: Bette & Joan (2017) and Morticia Addams in Wednesday (2022–present).
Aside from acting, Zeta-Jones is a brand endorser and supports various charitable causes. Her experience with depression and bipolar II disorder has been well documented by the media. She is married to actor Michael Douglas, with whom she has two children.
Early life and initial stage career
She was born Catherine Zeta Jones on 25 September 1969 in Swansea, Wales, to a Welsh father, David Jones, the owner of a sweet factory, and his wife Patricia (née Fair), a seamstress, who was of Irish Catholic descent. She was named after her grandmothers, Catherine Fair and Zeta Jones; Zeta was the name of a ship that her great-grandfather had sailed on. She has an older brother, David, and a younger brother, Lyndon, who worked as a sales representative before venturing into film production. She was born and raised in the Treboeth area of Swansea before moving to the Mumbles area of the city after her parents' bingo win of £100,000. Because Zeta-Jones was a hyperactive child, her mother sent her to the Hazel Johnson School of Dance when she was four years old. She was educated at Dumbarton House School, a private school in Swansea. The family came from a modest background, but their fortunes improved with their bingo win, thus enabling them to pay for their daughter's dance and ballet lessons.
Zeta-Jones participated in school stage shows from a young age and gained local media attention when her rendition of a Shirley Bassey song won a Junior Star Trail talent competition. As part of a dance troupe, she routinely took trips to London, where she auditioned for roles in the theatre. At age nine, Zeta-Jones was selected to play July, one of the orphan girls in the original West End production of the musical Annie, and in her early teens, she became a national tap-dancing champion. In 1981, she played the lead role of Annie in a Swansea production of the musical, which was staged at the Swansea Grand Theatre. Two years later, she played the lead role of Tallulah in a West End production of Bugsy Malone. When she was fifteen, Zeta-Jones left school without obtaining O-levels and decided to live in London to pursue a full-time acting career. Describing her teenage years in London, Zeta-Jones said, "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 attend the independent Arts Educational Schools in the Chiswick district of London, for a three-year course in musical theatre.
From November 1985 to January 1986, she performed as a company member in a production of The Pajama Game at the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester. In 1987, seventeen-year-old Zeta-Jones was picked as the second understudy for the lead actress in a West End production of 42nd Street. During one of the performances, both the star and the first understudy were unavailable, and Zeta-Jones was asked to play the role of Peggy Sawyer—a chorus girl who becomes a star. The producer was impressed by her acting ability and allowed her to play the part for the following two years. Her next stage appearance was with the English National Opera at the London Coliseum in 1989 where she played Mae Jones in Kurt Weill's Street Scene.
Career
1990–1996: Screen debut and career struggles
In 1990, Zeta-Jones made her film debut in the director Philippe de Broca's film 1001 Nights. An adaptation of the Arabic fable One Thousand and One Nights, the French-Italian production recounts the tale from the perspective of Scheherazade (Zeta-Jones), one of the brides of King Sharir (Thierry Lhermitte). 1001 Nights did not perform well at the box office, and according to de Broca's obituary in The Daily Telegraph, the film "is best remembered for its enjoyable nude scenes." Greater success followed when she starred opposite David Jason and Pam Ferris in the ITV period comedy-drama television series The Darling Buds of May from 1991 to 1993. Adapted from H. E. Bates' novel of the same name, Zeta-Jones played the role of the eldest daughter of a family living in the countryside in 1950s Britain. The series was the highest-rated television show in the country at the time, and Zeta-Jones gained wide public recognition for it. "Literally, with one hour of television my life completely changed. I couldn't go anywhere", she remarked.
Following a brief appearance as Beatriz Enríquez de Arana in the unsuccessful adventure film Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992), Zeta-Jones featured as a belly dancer in disguise in a 1992 episode of George Lucas' television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. She next took on the part of an aspiring duchess in Splitting Heirs (1993), a farcical period drama from the director Robert Young about two children (Eric Idle and Rick Moranis) who are separated at birth. Reviews of the film were negative, though the critic Vincent Canby of The New York Times found her to be "very funny". In 1994, Zeta-Jones played the melancholic Eustacia Vye in the television film The Return of the Native, an adaptation of the 1878 novel of the same name by Thomas Hardy, and the wife of Lloyd Owen's character in the television war drama The Cinder Path. She was then cast as the eponymous protagonist of the 1995 television biopic Catherine the Great. In a mixed review, critic Lisa Nesselson of Variety found the miniseries to be "brightly colored" but "wooden and hollow", though thought that Zeta-Jones "imparts a certain grace and resolve to her sovereign-in-the-making". She next appeared as the pragmatic girlfriend of Sean Pertwee's character in Blue Juice (1995), publicised as Britain's first surf film, which the critic Leonard Maltin dismissed as a "superficial and predictable" production.
Dismayed at being typecast as the token pretty girl in British films, Zeta-Jones relocated to Los Angeles…