Catherine Zeta-Jones is an Oscar-winning Welsh actress. Born Catherine Jones in Swansea, West Glamorgan, Wales, her name stems from those of her grandmothers; one named Catherine, and the other Zeta, named after a ship which her great-grandfather had sailed on. She was one of three children born to Patrick Jones, a Welsh candy factory worker, and Dia Fair, who was of Irish Catholic extraction; Catherine has raised a Catholic. Besides English, she speaks Welsh, Spanish, and French fluently. As a child, she had a tracheotomy that left a scar.
Early Life
Zeta-Jones’ stage career began in childhood. She sang and danced her way to local stardom as a part of a Catholic congregation’s performing troupe before she was 10, and by 1987 she was starring in Forty-Second Street as Peggy Saywer in the West End. Once the show closed, Zeta-Jones travelled to France, where she received the lead role in French director Phillippe De Broca’s 1001 Nights (a.k.a. Sheherazade), her feature film debut.
Singing and Acting
Her magnificence, alongside her singing and moving capacity, recommended a promising future, yet it was in a straight acting job, as Mariette in the fruitful TV transformation of H. E. Bates’ The Darling Buds of May (1991), that she made her name. She became famous outside Britain after leading roles in two movies, The Mask of Zorro (1998) with Antonio Banderas and Entrapment (1999) with Sean Connery. It is said that she gained the role in Zorro after Steven Spielberg saw her performance in the Lifetime Television event of Titanic, also starring Tim Curry and Peter Gallagher.
Awards and Achievements
She won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the movie Chicago in 2003. On October 22, 2005, she parodied this fact as a guest host on the TV show Saturday Night Live, surrounded by four male dancers, mimicking the Bob Fosse-inspired Chicago-style dancing, proposing in the tune that, regardless of how awful she maybe that night, “They Can’t Take My Oscar Away.” Apart from her acting vocation, Zeta-Jones is additionally a promoting representative for the cell phone organization T-Mobile.
She is right now the worldwide representative for beauty care products monster, Elizabeth Arden. Zeta-Jones is hitched to entertain Michael Douglas, with whom she has two kids. Her child, Dylan Michael Douglas was conceived on August 8, 2000.
(Her American admirers like to feel that he is named after Bob Dylan – a most loved of Douglas – while her British admirers like to imagine that Dylan Thomas, also born in Swansea, was the inspiration, although Dylan is a reasonably common Welsh first name). Carys Zeta Douglas (her daughter) was born in 2003. Zeta-Jones has determined that her children grow up aware of their Welsh heritage and have built a seaside dream home in her hometown of Swansea.
Selected filmography
The Legend of Zorro (2005)
Ocean’s Twelve (2004)
The Terminal (2004)
Intolerable Cruelty (2003)
Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003) (voice)
Chicago (2002)
America’s Sweethearts (2001)
Traffic (2000)
High Fidelity (2000)
The Haunting (1999)
Entrapment (1999)
The Mask of Zorro (1998)
Titanic (1996) (miniseries)
The Phantom (1996)
Splitting Heirs (1993)
The Darling Buds of May (1991) (TV series)
Trivia
Has the same birthday as husband Michael Douglas. Douglas is 25 years her senior.
For her job in Chicago, she explicitly mentioned a 1920s-style short bounce hairstyle, so her face could be seen and fans wouldn’t question she did all her moving.
