Catherine Zeta-Jones: Woman with a Past

https://lebeauleblog.com/2020/02/20/catherine-zeta-jones-woman-with-a-past/

When I saw the title of this article, I assumed that this was a bit of hyperbole. Movieline, like any publication, tried to grab the reader’s attention any way they could. By now, we’re all very familiar with Catherine Zeta-Jones. I, for one, was unaware of her having any skeletons in the closet.

Turns out I was wrong. This cover story comes from the February 1999 issue of Movieline when American audiences were just discovering the Welsh actress. She actually did have a scandalous reputation thanks to the British tabloids. Zeta-Jones discusses how she went from an exile in England to an unknown in America.

Who is that? The question reverberated throughout Hollywood the minute the first photo spreads of her started to appear in magazines in the buildup to the release of The Mask of Zorro. She had the look of a magnificent Latina–or was it Asian or Indian blood that made her such an exotic knockout? Even in portraits, she was a glorious alternative to Hollywood’s usual parade of faintly androgynous, anorexic young actresses. Raven-haired, amber-eyed, impossibly lush, she exuded a saucy, self-assured carnality rarely seen since the days of Sophia Loren, Claudia Cardinale and Natalie Wood. Who was she? And where had she come from?

Even as The Mask of Zorro hit theaters and the name Catherine Zeta-Jones became associated with the spectacular beauty who traded en gardes and double entendres with Antonio Banderas, the question–who is she? –lingered. At the very least she was the most extraordinary new face on celluloid. To many, she held the promise of something even more prized–a new movie star. She’d already been handpicked by Sean Connery to costar with him in the big-budget romantic thriller he was producing, Entrapment. Where on earth had this creature been hiding until now? Was she a former model? Had she been concocted in a test tube on another planet? Who was Catherine Zeta-Jones?

The answer is, as it turns out, rather complicated. She had not, for one thing, arrived Birth of Venus-style with The Mask of Zorro. We had actually seen Zeta-Jones before. We just hadn’t taken proper notice of her. She’d been the slithery villainess in that expensive misfire The Phantom. She’d been Thomas Hardy’s tempest-tossed heroine in the Hallmark Hall of Fame‘s The Return of the Native. She’d been an aristocratic beauty aboard a ship bound for a watery grave in CBS’s Titanic. But there was far more to the story of Catherine Zeta-Jones than that.What most people didn’t know, even after The Mask of Zorro had put her in Hollywood’s official spotlight, was that Zeta-Jones had already lived a life in the spotlight. She’d been a star long before Hollywood decided to declare her one.

Catherine Zeta-Jones was born 29 years ago in Swansea, Wales, a fishing town that is also the birthplace of Dylan Thomas and Anthony Hopkins. The daughter of a loving family that included one older and younger brother, and was headed by a seamstress mother and a candy factory manager father, she was a performer from the start. She wowed fellow villagers as the 11-year-old lead in a production of Annieand at 13 starred in a West End production of the musical Bugsy Malone. At 15, she got herself cast in a bus-and-truck tour of The Pajama Game. By 16, she’d been tapped by legendary stage maestro David Merrick to take over the lead in his all-singing, all-dancing West End smash 42nd Street. What might have been a career that was half Rita Hayworth, half Ann Miller turned into something else altogether when Zeta-Jones was cast, at age 19, as the buxom, dazzling daughter of a decadent ’50s family in the sexy, nostalgic British TV series The Darling Buds of May.

Unheard of in America, The Darling Buds was hugely popular all over Great Britain. Overnight, 23 million Sunday evening viewers seized on the young beauty’s ripe looks and minx-like allure. Catherine Zeta-Jones became a national obsession, Britain’s perfect antidote to the barrage of Persian Gulf War coverage, and during the show’s three-year reign, her entire life became fodder for gossip. British tabloids–pit bulls that make their U.S. counterparts look like lapdogs–were rabid in their pursuit of her; they followed her day and night, sifted through her trash and set up surveillance equipment outside her house. The young overnight sensation got eaten alive by celebrity. And after she’d been chewed up, she got spat out.

When I meet Zeta-Jones in Pacific Palisades, where she owns a home not far from those of Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise and her village-mate and old friend Anthony Hopkins, I am, naturally, curious about the months she just spent filming Entrapment in places like Malaysia, Hong Kong and Scotland with director Jon Amiel and Sean Connery. I also want to know about the film she’s embarking on, Jan De Bont’s big-budget The Haunting of Hill House.