Catherine Zeta-Jones: Woman with a Past

"So, how was the kiss?" I ask.

"Sean is a good kisser," she says, grinning. "Antonio Banderas was a very good kisser, too," she adds. What makes for a good kiss? "Someone who does it quick so that we can get the shot perfectly on the first take," she fires back. Then she adds, "Someone who doesn't make my nose look smashed--which can be difficult because a bratty boy slammed a door on it and broke it when I was 12. A good kisser also holds my chin so that my profile is really fabulous, dahh-ling. Someone who holds the cleft of my back so that it arches just right and gives me a great silhouette--that's what I call a good kisser."

"How about in real life?" I ask. "Ever have a kiss that made your knees buckle?"

Zeta-Jones narrows her eyes and spoofs serious consideration of this question. "I remember someone kissing me in a nightclub," she confides with a smile. "I thought, 'How awful is this, for him to kiss me in a sweaty nightclub in the middle of a dance floor?' Well, it was the best kiss I've ever, ever, ever had. With this mayhem, drinking, pounding music, dancing and the two of us completely still. I was thinking, 'Wow, what a great shot!'" She gleefully rubs her hands together.

Given her comments about Connery, can one assume that Zeta-Jones might like older men? Lots. "Older men come on to me all the time, and I'm really happy about that. I really like them. I'm probably the only person on the beach who sees a hard-bodied guy and goes, 'Oh, put it away, will you?' Beautiful boys are far too interested in making themselves look beautiful. They don't want any competition. At the beach, I'm more likely to be attracted to a guy no one else notices sitting far off and under an umbrella reading a book.

"Sean is," she continues, "the sexiest man I've ever met. His body is so great, it's unbelievable. Do you know, he's the most youth-oriented person? He knows who's number one on the music charts, which I don't. He knows every single band on MTV, which I don't watch. Like, he said, 'Kid, who's that Welsh band that was on the MTV Awards?' I'm like, 'Hmm?' He's intensely charismatic. I find all that sexy. And his forearms? The best. The very best."

His forearms? "The sexiest part of a man," she declares, with a Giaconda smile. "I always love to see a man driving with his forearm out the window. Mmmm!" She shakes herself out of a pretend reverie. "Let me tell you what, as a woman, makes me absolutely melt. Someone who radiates charisma--the single sexiest thing in the world. Sean definitely has that. Antonio Banderas has it. Anthony Hopkins has it. Liam Neeson, with whom I'm doing my next movie, has it as well. They have this wonderful sense of irony, a twinkle in the eye that makes them all the more attractive."

How would Zeta-Jones rate her own sexuality? "I can be sexy," she says playfully. "I have been known to be." Here she sobers up and says matter-of-factly, "I make the best of myself. I know that I am photogenic, but I also know that you cannot just rest on looks."

"What's your sexiest body part?"

"My spine is the sexiest part of my body," she answers like a shot. "I've got a really bendy back, in part from being a dancer."

Now, for that enduring female mystery question: "What would you choose first--sex or chocolate?" Zeta-Jones sends me an are-you-joking? look while answering, "No contest whatsoever. Sex. The only thing better than sex is sex with chocolate on top."

"Gotten up to anything like that recently?"

"I want to be in love all the time," she purrs. "I want to be like--" She flares her nostrils, lowers her eyelids and does Maria-Callas-in-the-throes-of-romantic-obsession. "I've let myself down so many times by just thinking that I'm falling in love. Then I see reason and go, oh gawd. Invariably, the guys I get off on, or the guys that are into me, have lives just as busy as mine. I've been single for quite awhile and it's great. I'm ready to wait for someone who's going to be the best thing that ever happened to me. I want someone who's got something working upstairs, who cares for me as much as I care for him, and who's my best friend. To people who say, 'You can't be lovers with your best friend,' I say, 'Bollocks.'"

Surely she hasn't joined the army of Hollywood knockouts who spend nights with pals, a popcorn maker and the TV remote. "I get so many invitations to go to all these fancy, fabulous things," she replies, "and though I absolutely love to put on a great dress, get my hair done and wave to the cameras, I'm just so lazy. I'm like, 'If I go out, I'll have to get a car and driver because I love my champagne.' I'm always, 'Let's have some Cristal!' Then I go, 'Do I really want to go? What shall I wear?' In the end I usually decide, 'I should really get into the pool house and give it a good sweeping.'"

If Entrapment does as well as The Mask of Zorro, Zeta-Jones will find it a lot harder to hide out. The ante could easily go up further with The Haunting of Hill House, the big-budget take on Shirley Jackson's superbly shivery novel that places Zeta-Jones with Liam Neeson, Lili Taylor and Owen Wilson in a story about four idiosyncratic souls who are all in way over their heads investigating a ghostly old dark house. Zeta-Jones's role, that of a chic, sharp-tongued, no-nonsense stunner who also happens to be a lesbian, was played in a 1963 screen version by the gorgeous, smart Claire Bloom. "It's a completely different film genre, a completely different audience for me," Zeta-Jones explains when I ask what attracted her to this piece over other projects for which she was rumored to be wanted (e.g., the role Heather Graham took in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, the Tomb Raider movie, the long-rumored next Indiana Jones movie). "Jan [De Bont] is frightened I'm going to go too deep with the character, but I'm going to go deep anyway. I really want to play on the eccentric. My entrance alone is very Norma Desmond. I see my character as a showgirl, so I'm going to swoop into the old house with 16 pieces of luggage, dressed like secondhand Rose. I'll get a look at Lili Taylor's repressed character, who's staring down from this huge staircase, and shout, 'Hel-lo!' I mean, you just know my character is going to have to play a very big scene on that stairway."

If Zeta-Jones gets her way, in fact, she'll be playing lots of big scenes from here on in. Sources close to The Haunting of Hill House say she advised them that if they couldn't find more for her to do in the last third of the movie than run around in a nightgown looking scared, they should just kill off the character. They found more for her to do.

"It's taken me 15 years to get where I am and I haven't even started," Zeta-Jones says when I ask her for her long-term career view. "I want to play women on emotional levels that even I've never been on, and, believe me, I'm like a rolling sea--up or down. I want to work with the contemporary equivalent of directors like Louis Malle and Francois Truffaut, who trusted beautiful, fascinating women like Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau to be sexy, to have the emotional attributes of full, real, complex beings, to be on the emotional edge and not base their beauty and fascination on a great pair of tits. I don't want to be a flash in the pan. I want to be Anne Bancroft. I want to be Gena Rowlands. I want a big life, not just a big career."

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Gus Van Sant for the Dec./Jan. 99 issue of Movieline.

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