When Catherine Zeta-Jones turned the heat up in Hollywood with her fiery turn in The Mask of Zorro, it seemed as if she'd arrived fully formed out of nowhere. But it didn't happen that way at all.
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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 Annie and 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 T_he 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-budge_t The Haunting of Hill House_. But I'm most curious about what, exactly, went on in London that led Zeta-Jones to uproot herself and move to Los Angeles.
In case you're wondering, up close Zeta-Jones is a full-on stunner: all statuesque 68 inches of her are groomed and dressed as if the studio system were still in full force and she'd been taught that being a movie star requires looking like one. While she pointedly pretends not to notice the numbers of single men who've positioned themselves at adjacent tables to pretend not to be watching her, I mention how refreshingly she differs from most actresses today, who seem to want the salaries of stars without the hassle of looking the part. "Oh, please, life's too short--they should just get over it," she laughs, radiating a forthrightness that gives her charisma extra dash. "America seems to breed that, and whoever's doing it, let's isolate the gene and cut it out.
"Listen," she continues, warming to her theme. "I used to do that no-makeup, straight-hair, really-dark-coat, frumpy thing so many actresses do, because I was told to. When I asked why I was supposed to look like I slept under a bridge all night. I was told, 'You shouldn't go in looking glamorous, because casting people and directors want to see you looking natural.' But I wasn't getting hired, so finally I said, 'Oh bollocks! Can't I just wear my Gucci clogs? What do you mean my character wouldn't wear them? I wear them.' Only when I started going to auditions as myself, dolled up, did I get work." She chases this mouthful with a roaring, full-bodied laugh.
Realizing already that Zeta-Jones is fully prepared to provide a lively version of the previous existence that made her Hollywood ascent more the resurrection of, rather than the birth of, a star, I decide to gel right to the subject: "So how did your career in England go haywire alter you became famous with The Darling Buds of May?"
Zeta-Jones shudders at the mention of that bit of her personal history. "My life changed the night the first show aired," she says in a musky, throbbing lilt that recalls the voice of Ingrid Bergman.
"Well, I know the short version of the story." I tell her. "What's the longer form? What made it so crazy?"
I was the new kid on the block," Zeta-Jones begins. "Someone on whom they didn't have anything, whom they hadn't seen in anything before, as far as TV viewers were concerned. To them, the stage work I'd done--things like the English National Opera's revival of Kurt Weill's Street Scene. Anthony Hopkins's revival of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood--were nothing. I'd done everything I could in the way of classes and training to be ready for a career, but I'm not from a show-business family. My friends were regular people. I literally didn't know what to do. I didn't go out of my way to manipulate the media, or do anything to get more attention or make more money, but every single day there was something new about me in the newspapers and magazines.
"I was 20, going out and having fun for the first time, and that was all documented by the British press. I'd never been a party girl at all. Suddenly, someone I so much as shared a cup of coffee with became, in the papers, the 'new love of my life.' I went from 'never going out and nothing going on' to people thinking I was having everyone out behind the shed. When I didn't want to participate in the stuff journalists wanted, like talking about when I lost my virginity, it got very nasty. And no one taught me how to protect myself or deal with all that attention. I remember arriving at an airport one time, seeing my face on the cover of every tabloid, thinking. 'What have I done, murdered someone?' Some of what they said at times was very nice and complimentary. But I think of myself back then as trapped."
"And then the vise tightened?" I ask.
"There were terrible lies written in the press about how I'd stolen somebody's husband, an actor with whom I worked," Zeta-Jones continues. "They wrote how this man's wife, a very smart writer, dropped off her kids at school, only to be told by the mothers, 'How terrible that your husband's running off with Catherine Zeta-Jones.' I felt disgusting and horrible and, even when I said it was all absolute lies. I still couldn't afford to sue the tabloids. I felt like this marriage-and-family-breaker. It was ghastly. Later, when Diana Princess of Wales died and there was that big international outcry about the media and the paparazzi, the wife of this gentleman whom I had supposedly stolen wrote an amazing article in The Guardian about what it meant to have her life connected with mine."
"Is it true you actually smashed up your car in London trying to elude the press?" I ask.
Zeta-Jones nods. "I was driving my little Mazda Miata and I could see in the rearview mirror that they were following me. So I turned left into this oily little backstreet and I skidded and hit a lamppost. I was basically unharmed and they just drove away."
"And what was all this doing for you careerwise?"
"I did a couple of scenes in a couple of small films, and they were written about as though it were my fault that they flopped," she declares, referring, I gather, to Splitting Heirs, a flat souffle in which she costarred with Rick Moranis and an equally stranded Barbara Hershey.
"The perception of me started to affect the small nucleus of people who made creative decisions about films I was totally cut off from a whole new generation of filmmakers and stage directors coming out of Great Britain. To them, I suppose I was TV or just fluffy. I didn't even get close to [Trainspotting director] Danny Boyle, [Jude director] Michael Winterbottom or [Cabaret revival director] Sam Mendes. And all the while, I was going nuts seeing some projects other people were doing and going, 'What's that woman doing there instead of me?'"
"So, while Helena Bonham Carter, Kate Winslet, Emily Watson and Cate Blanchett got the sort of roles you longed for, you were doing a little number called Blue Juice?"
"I could just see myself having a lot of money but doing crap, being just sexy and pretty, for the rest of my life, and I didn't want that," Zeta-Jones says defiantly. "It was a very personal kick in the stomach. My wonderful agent, who's been with me since I was a kid, kept saying, 'Hang on, Catherine, hang on. They either want to meet you or they don't.' I was this close to giving them all the big finger and going, 'Sit on that, OK?' But I'm not like that as a person."
"And then?"
"Around this time, there came a three-page article about 'Catherine Zeta-Jones, has-been at 24.' I was called a 'loser,' that terrible word that should be stricken from the language. I definitely started to lose my confidence. Finally, I decided--maybe I was out of my mind--I wanted to come to America, even though I knew only one person here. It was hard, especially since I'd never spent one Christmas away from my family. Immediately, they wrote in Britain that I went to Hollywood to pick up my failing career."
All of which brings us back to Pacific Palisades where, circa 1995, she settled into an apartment. "It was opposite the Self-Realization Fellowship and the number of the apartment building was 666," she says wryly. "I thought: good omen. I was really lonely. One time I also stayed between leases in a friend's big house in Malibu--I was so scared. I slept in the closet."
But surely she did not spend every waking moment in the closet. When I broach the subject of past romances, it becomes evident how scorched she has been by the notoriety that attended her personal life in her first era of stardom. Zeta-Jones has no intention of discussing the apparently quite serious relationships she reportedly had with British TV star John Leslie, with movie actor Angus MacFadyen, or with ex-movie mogul Jon Peters, from whom she broke off after he proposed rather than risk becoming a Hollywood trophy wife. Nor will she discuss her romance with singer Mick Hucknall. "The focus is back on what makes me happiest, which is my work," she says pointedly.
Zeta-Jones is equally reticent about the whys and wherefores of some films she reportedly didn't land when she first came to Hollywood, including two that then-hot British import Julia Ormond won, First Knight and Sabrina. "I knocked on door after door to be greeted by, 'So, what have you done?'" she recalls, savoring the irony of having gone from a situation in which doors were closed thanks to intense notoriety to a situation in which doors were slammed thanks to complete obscurity. "It was like another big slap in the face," she recalls. "But that was very centering for me."
But she hardly went hungry. In 1996 she appeared in a showy, however futile, role in The Phantom. Finally, after she'd booked passage as a heroic beauty on TV's cut-rate Titanic, her break came when Steven Spielberg spotted her in that disaster and deemed her, wittily, "worth rescuing from that ship." He recommended her to director Martin Campbell for The Mask of Zorro. Despite Spielberg's endorsement, Campbell had serious doubts--he later admitted in print his "surprise" at how good Zeta-Jones turned out to be. "My screen test with Antonio Banderas was really bizarre because there were two other girls in the screen test at the same time," says Zeta-Jones. "We'd each improvise with Antonio. Oh, but hell, as long as I was one of the three, I didn't care." Reminded of this, she lets out a merry snort, explaining, "The reason Campbell didn't think I'd be very good was because I hadn't had very good things to do in most movies I'd done before. You can't judge a performer on four scenes in a bad movie." After a moment, she adds, "Well, OK, maybe he was right, but I didn't think I'd been that bad." Then she tosses back her head, mock-theatrically, and bellows into the tape recorder, "You didn't see my thea-tah, Martin, dahhhh-ling!"
"When the tabloids printed unfounded rumors that Melanie Griffith 'fought tooth and claw' to make sure Antonio Banderas and you, his 'sultry costar,' weren't getting along too well, did you say, 'Oh, no, not this bullcrap again?'"
"I went, 'Oh, shit. Give Melanie a break,'" Zeta-Jones replies. "She had just given birth and was down in Mexico on location to be with her husband, exactly as I would be doing. She was lovely and professional, asking if I'd mind if she watched us shoot a sword fight. When I told people how nice she was, they'd still say, 'Well, she had to be nice to you.' I was like, 'Oh, fuck off!'"
Gossip and her director's misgivings aside, Zeta-Jones emerged from Zorro smelling like a rose--even in England, where she wowed them at the royal premiere and got reviews that matched the excitement she generated stateside. "It's astounding the international appeal generated by being in one successful American movie," she marvels. "I don't have to tell you there's a definite hierarchy, a filtration process when it comes to script material. There's not a lot of power to being an actor apart from being able to read material that's going to the big boys and girls. And some of those interesting British directors, the ones who wouldn't even see me before? They've sent projects, too."
How could they not? Here's a girl who's bigger than life and not abashed at showing it, perhaps because she's already won, lost and recaptured major fame. Handling her second dose of stardom--and this time a far bigger helping--she's a poised, seasoned and gracious pro. Even her body language reveals a joy at doing things smarter the second time around. "I love being bold, alive, in the moment," she says. "Those are qualities of the strong, brave stars I grew up loving. I've always thought I was born in the -wrong era. I have a picture of myself of when I was 15 and I look like Natalie Wood. I love those women."
"Is that why, on the rare occasions you're photographed out on the town, you look every inch the old-style movie goddess?"
Zeta-Jones offers a knowing sidelong glance. "I love glamour and glitz, going to premieres dressed up and smiling and waving. What I don't love is being chased in my car by two men on a motorbike--there's a big difference. But in America, I'm free to go anywhere I want. It seems ridiculous to me that people used to look through my garbage. And the quality of the work I'm being offered? All I keep thinking every day is, 'My God, this is great. Enjoy it while it lasts. I'm someone who doesn't take a thing for granted. I feel blessed."
How long all this lasts will depend to some degree on Zeta-Jones's upcoming movie, Entrapment, the big-budget The Thomas Crown Affair-style thriller in which she and Connery play adversarial and, finally, amorous thieves. "They flew me on one of these whistle-stop things to Rome to meet with Sean and see how he and I felt together," she recalls. "I got to the hotel, had my hair done and met Sean in a hotel by the Spanish Steps. He was very honest about how they were seeing a lot of people and the studio wanted a name. Later I did a screen test to see that the age difference wasn't too much." Apparently for Connery, the age difference wasn't a problem. How about for her? "That was right in the front of my mind all the way to Rome," she admits. "I knew I wanted to work with him, but, for the movie to work, we had to look right. There had to be that spark. Well, when I met him, I went--" she breaks off, and laughs, "I -went, 'Oh yes, I think we're going to be just fine.'
"I know people say all the time about movies, 'Older actors, always have to bed the young beauty,'" she continues. "But the relationship between me and Sean really works. His character is a complete bastard and my character is perfectly matched with his. I'm an international art thief who's very alone, very tough, very obsessed with money. Men aren't even in my equation. I want him as a partner because he's an old-fashioned thief who knows everything. When I first meet him, I use my bodily charms to woo him and he knocks me down with, 'What a complete and utter waste of time.' Against great action stuff, there's this wonderful romance they keep denying. And you see them, slowly, softening."
Zeta-Jones is openly proud of being able to keep pace with Connery. "I'd wake up in the morning scared, brushing my teeth in the mirror, thinking, 'I've got to cry on-screen for the next two days.' Then I'd get to the set, look at Sean and feel honored to be sharing an experience with someone like him. And even after shitting myself with fear on the set, I'd go back to my room at night, slip into the tub and go, 'Yeah. I actually did it.' Working with Sean was the best time I've ever had on a movie."
"OK, you guys are two of the planet's sexiest people, but the movie camera is relentless at finding fault, and Connery, icon and sex god though he may be, was 67 to your 28."
"But think of the classic couplings in older movies," she asserts. "Bogie and Bacall, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, Bogie and Audrey Hepburn--what makes them interesting isn't that the woman is younger, but that she's right on par with the man. That's what I wanted to play here. Sean's character has this superior attitude, but my character's stance is, 'Look, you may be 40 years older than I am, but isn't it unfortunate for you that I know everything you do, only 40 years earlier?' We don't have a love scene, but we do kiss. And I beat the shit out of him, which I love."
"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.