| Actress. Born Catherine Zeta Jones, on September 25, 1969, in Swansea,
West Glamorgan, Wales. The only daughter (she has two brothers) of working-class parents,
Zeta-Jones (she hyphenates her name professionally) had her eye on a stage career from an
early age. At age 11, she starred in a London production of Annie; at 14, she
played Tallulah, a pint-sized gangster’s moll, in a stage production of Bugsy
Malone (Jodie Foster had previously filled the role in a 1976 film version). Zeta-Jones moved to London at age 15 and lived with castmates while
pursuing an acting career full time. Just two years later, she won a part in the chorus of
a West End production of the musical 42nd Street. Within a year, Zeta-Jones won the
lead role of chorus girl-turned-star Peggy Sawyer. Shortly after the play closed, she made
her big screen debut in the title role in the French director Phillippe de Broca’s Shereherazade.
In 1991, Zeta-Jones achieved star status in the United Kingdom
with the tremendous success of Darling Buds of May, a television comedy series in
which she played the eldest daughter in a farming family. Attempting to make her name in
Hollywood as well, Zeta-Jones appeared in a 1992 episode of TV’s The Young Indiana
Jones Chronicles and in the forgettable epic Christopher Columbus: The Discovery
(1992). She had a certain measure of success with two TV projects—The Return of
the Native (1994) and the miniseries Catherine the Great (1995)—but had
less luck on the big screen, with disappointing projects like the slapstick comedy Splitting
Heirs (1993), starring funnymen Eric Idle, Rick Moranis, and John Cleese, and the
straight-to-video Blue Juice (1995), costarring Ewan McGregor. She also starred
opposite Billy Zane in the high-profile but low-rated The Phantom (1996).
It was her voyage on the Titanic (as in the 1996
miniseries, costarring Peter Gallagher and George C. Scott) that brought Zeta-Jones to the
attention of Steven Spielberg, who recommended her to the director of 1998’s The
Mask of Zorro, which Spielberg produced. As the spirited heroine of the swashbuckling
action-romance, costarring Antonio Banderas and Sir Anthony Hopkins, Zeta-Jones (and the
film) was a hit with both critics and audiences. She scored another coup shortly
thereafter, when she was cast opposite Sean Connery in the thriller Entrapment
(1999). Though the movie met with a mediocre reception, it was clear that the Welsh
actress had asserted herself as one of Hollywood’s most glamorous new faces.
Later in 1999, Zeta-Jones starred alongside Liam Neeson and Lili
Taylor in the less-than-stellar horror film The Haunting. The next year, she turned
in a sharp cameo in the witty comedy High Fidelity, starring John Cusack. In late
2000, Zeta-Jones played the wife of a Mexican drug lord in the Oscar-winning drama Traffic,
directed by Steven Soderbergh. She next starred as a temperamental Hollywood movie diva in
the comedy America's Sweethearts (2001), opposite box office queen Julia Roberts,
Billy Crystal, and John Cusack.
Zeta-Jones married Michael Douglas, her costar in Traffic
(though they share no scenes together), on November 18, 2000. The couple's son, Dylan
Michael Douglas, was born in August of 2000.
Source: biography.com
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