Catherine Zeta-Jones Is Enjoying Herself

When Catherine Zeta-Jones was a young girl, growing up as the daughter of a candy-factory owner and a seamstress in the seaside town of Swansea, Wales, she would stare at pictures of Elizabeth Taylor. She was initially entranced by Taylor’s tenuous connection to Wales, through her infamous and tumultuous relationship with the Welsh actor Richard Burton, but Zeta-Jones seems to have absorbed much more from watching Taylor than how to wear diamonds or enter into a power couple (though Zeta-Jones has done both, to spectacular effect). What Zeta-Jones shares with the late Taylor, as I found out while interviewing her one recent sunny afternoon over Zoom, while she lounged in her upstate New York home, is the regal bearing and honeyed, gravelly timbre of a classic movie star. At fifty-one, she has a theatrically languid way of moving and speaking, as if she is constantly about to stretch out on a chaise for a cocktail or a catnap. She doesn’t really seem to live in the same world, or the same era, as the rest of us.

Zeta-Jones’s story is a show-biz tale as old as time: girl from nowhere studies tap dancing, vaults to the stage (in her case, it was to London’s West End, where she started performing in musicals at the age of nine), gets a part in a big show as a second understudy, fills in for the lead on a lucky day, and, boom, a star is born. By the time she was eighteen, Zeta-Jones was starring in David Merrick’s dance spectacular “42nd Street” in London. But, as she told me, she was not content just to high-kick her way to a paycheck. She had dreams of being on film. She started out in television, in 1991, in the British comedy “The Darling Buds of May,” starring as the eldest daughter of a rural farming family. The show turned the young Zeta-Jones, a striking brunette, into a tabloid sensation, and while her film career had begun to take off in Europe, she left for Los Angeles to escape a media that she felt was more interested in her personal life than her acting chops. After a few rocky years of fruitless meet-and-greets, Zeta-Jones landed her first big American role, in Martin Campbell’s “The Mask of Zorro,” in which she played a feisty, fencing vigilante’s daughter in a muslin corset. In the years to come, Zeta-Jones excelled at playing beguiling and resourceful women—a nimble, undercover thief in “Entrapment,” a stiletto-wearing cartel boss in “Traffic,” a double-crossing screwball heroine in “Intolerable Cruelty,” a glamorous and petty bitch in “High Fidelity.”

Still, it was her return to her first love—musicals—that became the highlight of her career. As Velma Kelly in Rob Marshall’s “Chicago” (2002), a role for which she won an Oscar, Zeta-Jones was brilliantly precise; a vaudevillian vamp with a snarled lip and a flair for melodrama. “Chicago” showed another side of Zeta-Jones, the one that loves a shuffle-ball change as much as a ball gown, and she is still chasing that high. She won a Tony, in 2010, for the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music,” but Zeta-Jones told me that her biggest dream is to originate a role on the stage. That way, she told me, nobody can ever compare her to what came before. (“When I’m dead, they can say, ‘Oh, I saw Catherine Zeta-Jones in the original,’ ” she told me. “And I’ll be in my coffin going, ‘Yeah!’ ”) In April, Zeta-Jones will play a recurring role in several episodes of the Fox medical drama “Prodigal Son,” alongside her fellow Welsh actor Michael Sheen. When I told her that a promo still of her appearance, in which she is drilling into a patient’s brain, had become something of a meme of late, she laughed, saying, “If Catherine Zeta-Jones can do it, you, too, can give a lobotomy!” Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

You started out on TV, but before “Prodigal Son” you hadn’t done a show in a while.

Well, I played Olivia de Havilland in “Feud.”

Right. How did you prepare to do that?

I read a lot about her. Not that I needed to know a lot, because my biggest source was my father-in-law [Kirk Douglas], who knew her very well. She has a very special way of speaking, a very breathy, very rather British way.

Yeah, it’s a shock, because you played her so lovingly, but she was so litigious afterward. She tried to take her defamation case all the way to the Supreme Court.

We have to admire women like her, who literally changed Hollywood in how women stood, and stood for contracts, being under the whole doctrine of the studio system. She was monumentally forward in her thinking, in her actions. And I love the fact that, at a hundred and one years old, she ain’t lost it. When I was hired to play that role, I presumed that the estate and the company would have done their due diligence in name and likeness and I.P., which is a very, very important commodity in our business. Anyone who protects their name and likeness I wholeheartedly support, because, as actors, it’s all we have.

Did you ever meet her?

Oh, I can’t say that I met her, but when I won my Oscar, [in 2003,] it was the seventy-fifth year, and they had all the past living winners onstage, and there she was in her glory.

Let’s go back. I know you started acting at a very young age.

“Annie” was my first show on the West End, when I was nine. Then I did “Bugsy Malone” onstage, with Micky Dolenz directing. I was in musicals. It was really hard for me back then to get into straight acting. It’s like, “Oh, she’s a hoofer. She’s a dancer. She’s a singer.” I was like, like, O.K., put me in a box. I eventually opened that box.

The same thing happened with getting into television. They said, “Well, she’s really a stage actress. She’s only done stage. She hasn’t done TV.” And then getting into film, it was like, “Well, she’s really a TV actress.” So now I’m in film. So O.K., am I allowed to do a bit of everything now, like I’ve always wanted to do?

Were your parents very supportive at the beginning? How did they know to put you in show business?

I was very excitable and kind of, I don’t know, performy, as a child. I wasn’t shy. As I got older, I got shy. But when I was young I was fearless. At the end of my garden, there was a church and a cathedral. And in the back there was a hall where a dancing teacher called Hazel Johnson used to teach tap dancing and modern. At four years old, my mother bought me tap shoes. I put them on, she tied them up, and that was it. My mom took me down to the end of the garden, opened the fence, walked into the chair hall and said, “Can you take her?” And Hazel goes, “She’s too young. She needs to be at least six.” The next year, she took me, and then she was my dancing teacher all my life.

You were from an artsy place, Swansea, in Wales.

Where I come from is this little pimple on the world map, it’s where Dylan Thomas was born.

The government put money into the arts. The theatre was lovely and restored, so there were lots of amateur dramatics. And as Thomas said, “We are a musical nation.” And when you think about my home town, in a radius of thirteen miles, you’ve got Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins, Rhys Ifans, me, Stanley Baker, Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Michael Sheen. Tony Hopkins directed me when I was very young, in a play. And then I did “Zorro” with him, and he was at my wedding.

I used to have cutouts of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. It all felt so far removed from my world and so aspirational. But Richard Burton was from Pontrhydyfen! He was up the street, so it can happen! My home town is literally the end of the station from London. From there you have to get a bus, if you want to go any farther west, you have to go get a bus or get the ferry to Ireland.

So how does a girl from the end of the train line get a role on the West End?

For “Annie,” when they were casting, they did a stunt. Like, “We’re going all around the country!” It was publicity, I know now, for the show itself, but they did find regional kids who were not from show-biz families or stage schools in London. They’d hold these cattle-market calls; every kid in the world would go. I was one of those kids. I went and I got cast as July. And then the same thing with “Bugsy Malone.” I travelled up to London and stood in line for five hours for an audition.

When you were in “Annie,” at nine, did your parents accompany you?

No, the show had chaperones and nannies. And we used to have school in the theatre and tutors. But I could only work for three months, because of the child laws. And then when I did “Bugsy Malone,” I was thirteen. So I could do six months, three shows a week.

So you’re thirteen and living more or less without your parents in London?

Yeah, it was what I wanted to do. As much as I love my country—and nobody loves my country as much as me, you know how patriotic I am—I knew I couldn’t do what I needed to do there. And my parents said that to my headmaster when I left school, at fifteen, to go and do a touring production to get my Equity card. I kept saying, “I’ll come back to school, I promise. But if I can get my Equity card, it’s like the golden ticket in ‘Willy Wonka.’ ”

What was the production that got you your card?

“Pajama Game.” I was in the chorus. I did “42nd Street” after that. I was a chorus girl, and I was second understudy in the West End. And then I got on. The girl, I believe, was on holiday, and I was thrown on. David Merrick, the Broadway god, happened to be watching that show—he used to go around the world watching his shows to see if they were up to scratch. So I got cast in the lead role, and I played it for two years.

That must have felt like a big break.

It’s actually the story line of “42nd Street.” She gets on, and becomes a star!

You could have likely had a very long and successful musical-theatre career on the West End.

I wanted to be an actress. I wanted to hang up my tap shoes. I was eighteen and starring in this huge show. But I wanted to move on. I was cast in a French film by a director called Philippe de Broca, called “Les 1001 Nuits.” It was the first time in front of a camera, and I fell in love with it. The film didn't do anything really, but it got me my next job. I was in a television show that was very successful in Britain called “The Darling Buds of May.”

That show marked your first time of really being in the press. The tabloids really hounded you at that time.

Yeah, it screened on a Sunday night at eight o’clock, and by Monday morning my life changed. And for me, it was wowza. The attention! I’d been in the business long enough to understand that you kind of want that, at that age. You’ve been working all your life and then you get a break. But, on the downside, I didn’t have the finances to protect myself or to have any privacy.

I never went on the Tube anymore or the bus. Walking out of my house on the streets of London, I’d get barraged. Or, even scarier, was coming home at night and trying to get into my door. Be careful what you wish for. I craved a break like that. I craved it. And, when it came, it was really terrifying.

Is that why you decided to try working in the United States?

Over in the States, no one knew who I was. I’d be knocking on casting directors’ doors in Hollywood, not even getting an audition, just getting into a meet-and-greet. And they’d say, “What have you done?” And then I’d get back on a plane to go back to London, and there’d be loads of people waiting for me at the airport. Leaving Britain for me wasn’t like an “F you” moment. It was more of a, I’ve worked really hard to be an actor and now I’m becoming a celeb. And everyone was missing out on the point of my hard work. It was like, Oh, now she’s a big star. Now let’s knock her down. And so I came to the States because I had six months left on a visa where I could legally come in and meet casting directors. And I wanted to start fresh.

My first audition, and what I ultimately did, was the TV version of “Titanic” [1996]. I went, Well, I kind of came to Hollywood to be a movie star. But all right, I’m not doing the James Cameron version, so I guess I’ll do the TV version of it. I went into that going, O.K., at least I’ll have an American piece of something where I’m speaking with an American accent. But it was a catalyst that changed my course over here, because Steven Spielberg saw me in it and asked me to screen-test for “Zorro.”

So working in the States legitimized you?

I could see myself becoming an “Oops, she fell over coming out of the night club” person back home, as opposed to an actor loving my craft. My work was more important to me than titillation, than “Oh, look at her in a bikini.” That still goes on, but I’m older, wiser, and more mature about it.

You got to work with some pretty big names immediately. Antonio Banderas, in “Zorro”; Sean Connery in “Entrapment” [1999].

I love Sean, bless him. He was everything that I thought he was going to be. He called me “the kid.” He was extremely protective of me, to the point where if we were on a sound stage, and there was a rustle or a sound somewhere when I was working, he’d just yell, “Shut the fuck up, the kid’s acting!”

What were you doing when you met Michael [Douglas]?

I was shooting “Entrapment,” and I was promoting the European release of “Zorro” at the Deauville Film Festival. I did the event on a Friday night, and I was going to fly to Scotland the next day to meet Sean [Connery] on the Isle of Mull. Michael was there promoting “A Perfect Murder,” and he asked to meet me. I remember I walked through the door of the hotel when I arrived, and he walked right past me with his golf bag on his shoulder. I went, “O.K., guess he really wants to meet me, he just walked right past me.” He knew Antonio [Banderas] and Melanie [Griffith] for many years, and he joined us all for drinks and dinner. That night we found out we have the same birthday.

And it moved pretty quickly from there?

Well, he said he was going to be the father of my children.

What? He said that the first night he met you that he wanted to be the father of your children?

Yes! And I went, “All right. I’ve read a lot about you. I’ve seen a lot about you. I heard a lot about you. Good night.” And I went to bed and got up at 5 A.M. I went to London, changed planes, went to Aberdeen, got on a ferry across to the Isle of Mull. And there was a big bouquet of flowers saying “I’m sorry if I scared you. Love, Michael Douglas.” He always says whoever was the florist who got those flowers to the Isle of Mull saved his life. I will say if somebody says they’re going to father your children when you’ve just met them, it is a little scary. Unfortunately he was right, again.

I do want to ask you a little bit about your wedding, because I read somewhere that you said it was the longest wedding the Plaza had ever had. Why was it so long? What was going on?

We called it for six o’clock at night, and it ended at six o’clock the next morning. There was live music, dancing, and singing. And then when we finished that, in the kind of formal environment, we created a room with duelling pianos and all my friends, who were singers and songwriters. I had a Welsh choir at my wedding.

I’ve only ever been a bride once. Michael said, look, he’d been married before. But I wanted a wedding. I never really wanted to go off and just elope. I said no to gifts. I didn’t want any weather issues; I wanted it all inside. I didn’t want to wake up and think, Is it going to be a nice day? It does matter if it’s pissing with rain on my wedding day. I created a world inside the Plaza and it was wonderful.

When you moved to New York, what was that like?

I’d always had a passion for New York, much more than for L.A. I remember when I first came to New York, I was doing a television thing for the “Hallmark Hall of Fame”; I shot it in Britain with Clive Owen. It was an adaptation of a Thomas Hardy novel called “The Return of the Native,” and I had to come to promote it. I’d never been to New York. I remember crying when I saw the skyline for the first time, sitting in a back of a yellow cab.

Do you and Michael have sort of a routine? Do you have places where you’re regulars?

We live really close to the Park and, of course, sometimes, like New Yorkers are, we don’t take advantage of everything that’s right on our doorstep. It’s, like, everyone comes to New York and they expect me to have seen every play, and every opera, and every ballet, and every art-gallery installation.

And you left the city for about a decade.

When we had our kids, and then it got really tricky living in the city, in that it’d become very exposed for them. We used to take our daughter on the subway, and it just got me concerned—there were people following us with the cameras on the subway and stuff. And so we decided, my husband’s mother was from Bermuda, and his family there dates from the seventeenth century. So we went to Bermuda. And I said, “Well, it's a little bit farther than the Hamptons or Long Island, but I love it.” And so we lived there for twelve years and still have a home there. I started off COVID lockdown there.

Back to the work. Did you feel like you were getting typecast for a while in the nineties, as kind of this vixen, femme-fatale type?

You kind of take what comes your way. Before that, I was the ingénue. Then I was the vixen, swashbuckling and strong. I was enjoying playing those roles. I was getting success playing those roles. And for me, I’ve always just wanted to be surrounded by good people. I always want to be a little fish in a big sea. I don’t ever want to be the big fish in a little sea of talent. If it is a little bit of typecasting, as long as it’s good work, and it’s good people, and I want to be there with those people. That was always how I chose what I chose then, and how I choose now.

Let’s talk “Chicago.” You’re an old-school hoofer, they must’ve known that you could do the part.

Rob [Marshall], the director, had seen me at the English National Opera, in London. I was doing Kurt Weill’s “Street Scene” and Rob was [co-choreographing] “Kiss of The Spider Woman” with Chita Rivera at the same time. He knew some London folk who had known of my days in the West End, because Rob was a Broadway dancer before he became a fabulous director and friend. And so he said, “What do you want to play?” And I said, “I want to play Velma Kelly.” I said, “I can’t do ‘Chicago’ and not sing ‘All That Jazz.’ Are you kidding me?”

So I was cast very early on in the process, and it was a dream job for me. I mean, from beginning to end, of the camaraderie, the passion that we all had for the same goal to make this good because, historically, musicals, after the golden age of Hollywood, are hit and miss, man. They’re either very, very good or they’re horrid. There’s nothing in between.

And that’s still the case, honestly.

Yes. All my life I was thinking, Ah, I’m born in the wrong era. I should have been dancing with Gene Kelly. I should have been with Fred [Astaire]. I would have been with Judy [Garland]. And I was going, “Those days are over, they don’t make those anymore.” So just the idea alone of putting a musical on celluloid was, like, heart-stopping to me. With Rob, well, dancers and theatre people speak a different language than other folk. Rob is like a brother from a different mother. When he does a shoulder [shakes her shoulders in a shimmy], I know what he’s talking about. He does a wink, and I go, “Got it.”

And, I imagine, coming from the theatre you were used to his exhaustive rehearsal process.

We could have put it on the stage, because we rehearsed it so intently. When the film wrapped, I remember thinking, Well, if nobody ever sees this, it’s been the best experience of my life. I remember crying at the wrap party, going, “Oh, well. I’ll never get that again.”

Because it took you back to your youth?

It took me back to the grind. Just the story itself—the making it, the ambition, the determination. Everything about it was, to me, everything that I ever wanted to do. And then when it had the commercial and critical success, it was only a bonus of great magnitude, of course. But it was something to have forever, and an experience that I still yearn for.

Did you think, Oh, I’m going to maybe be a contender for an Oscar for this?

I never think that. I never read the script and go, Oh, this is juicy. This is kind of Oscar material. I’ve never, ever done that. And with “Chicago,” again, it goes back to the little fish in the big sea. When there was word of an Oscar, I was pregnant, so that I was like, “What? What? What? What’s an Oscar?” I had pregnant-woman brain. I was schlepping all around the world, promoting the movie with an ever-increasing bump. It kind of offset the craziness because it was, O.K., wow. It’s so exciting—and I’m having a baby.

One more thing about “Chicago”—I read a profile of Renée Zellweger, from 2019, and there is a detail about you in it that has been haunting my mind ever since. Can I read it to you?

O.K.

Jonathan Van Meter wrote, “Catherine Zeta-Jones and Zellweger and I would eventually all have dinner in Manhattan a couple months later. Zeta-Jones showed up late in a leather trench coat and a cloud of perfume and ordered a rare steak and Champagne. Zellweger arrived very early—in her running clothes—and ate steamed spinach.” I just want to know everything about that moment. What perfume do you wear? What was the leather trench coat? Why rare steak?

Rare steak! [Laughs.] I know I wasn’t late. I am never, ever late. Like, ridiculously on time. It’s one of the true similarities that I share with my husband. We arrive at dinner when the hostess is still in her hot rollers.

I remember that leather trench coat. It was Givenchy. There’s a real troubling story about that leather trench coat. I’m fifty-one years old, and I’ve travelled the world, and I think I’ve lost about four things in my life. When you’re a working-class kid, you don’t lose shit. You work for things. You pay for them. You own them. I’m never, like, “I lost my jewelry.” No! I know exactly where my jewelry is at any given time, in what drawer, in what pouch. The only reason why I remember the coat is because it was red and it was leather and I lost it.

No.

Yes. I left it on a plane, on a commercial plane. I mean, it’s not a small piece, either. I just left it on a plane and never got it back.

Do you have a signature perfume? When he said “cloud of perfume,” what was the scent?

It was probably Thierry Mugler Angel—it was probably something fabulous like that. Right now, it’s Tom Ford Noir or Jasmin Rouge.

This may be a good transition into fashion. I know Casa Zeta-Jones, your product line, just released a ready-to-wear collection.

Well, Casa Zeta-Jones is the umbrella of everything I love. My mother was a seamstress, and I sew. I actually made these cushions. [Holds up cream-colored sateen couch cushions.] Very easy! But my mother was literally like a full-on cutter and seamstress and worked all her life. I wasn’t allowed to touch her sewing machine. For me, this is an extension of my brand, which really started out with interiors. I’m a phenomenal, crazy interior-design-architect wannabe. What was fun to me was to create a brand that really kind of embodies me as a woman, not Catherine Zeta-Jones walking in heels on the red carpet. Hollywood is, I know, glamour, and all that stuff. And I have that, like, oozing from me. I would walk around in a pair of high mules and a bejewelled robe all day long, but I don’t. And so I wanted to create what I, in my life, what I do in my world, in my time, as a mother, as a business owner, as somebody who’s travelled a lot. I made these shoes. [Holds her feet up to the camera.]

Oh! The famous flats. I heard about those—where you wore uncomfortable boots to the airport and then had to buy emergency flats and decided to make your own?

Exactly. One blister changed my life.

But in your other life that oozes glamour, you’ve worn the most fantastic things. I think of your strapless red Versace dress from the 1999 Oscars.

I’ve been collecting vintage. Everything I’ve ever worn, if it was somebody who’s famous, somebody who actually cared if I wore one of their pieces, it’s all preserved and archived. I have everything. And my daughter’s dream is to go through my clothes. I’ve got some of them in catalogues, like my Oscar dresses and my Paris fashion. They’re all in storage. It’s the hunt for me, with clothes.

Is there a piece that you think of as the ultimate find?

One of my prized possessions is a vintage pink chinoiserie opera coat with big cuffs and feathers. I mean, I’ve never worn it. It’s too beautiful; it’s a piece of art. I’m going to frame it. When I could barely afford a bustier, I saved my money to buy a Vivienne Westwood. My husband calls me a high-class hoarder.

I have a lot of Birkins. A lot of them were given to me from my mother-in-law [Anne Buydens]. And she gave me beautiful jewelry that Kirk gave her, and she has a story behind each piece.

Well, this connects to a bigger question I have, about sort of your philosophy of life. I feel like you are someone who really enjoys life. It’s not hedonism exactly, but. . .

I do. I have a real sense of how blessed I am. And I don’t mean that like, Oh, I’m a lucky girl. I know how hard I’ve worked. But I’ve been blessed with good fortune in so many ways. I enjoy the fruits of my labor. I work hard and I reward myself. I pay my own way. I love to buy. I love to share. I love to travel like you can’t imagine. I want to go to every part of the world. I wish I could speak every language of the world. But anyone looking into my life would go, “She’d better God-damned like her life. Yeah, I’d like it, too.”