Oscar-winning Welsh actor An alchemist with a Midas who redefined glamour Touch for all things food
Catherine Zeta-Jones is a Welsh actor who has received numerous accolades, such as an Academy Award, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts award (BAFTA), and a Tony. After making a move to Hollywood from the stage and the British film industry where she worked for many years, she appeared in a slew of glamorous roles in films such as ‘The Mask of Zorro’ and ‘Entrapment’.
She also delivered an acclaimed performance in the drug drama Traffic, for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe. She followed it up with an Oscarwinning
performance in the 2002 hit musical Chicago. Zeta-Jones continues to work across a variety of genres, and has appeared in the black comedy Intolerable Cruelty, the rom-com No Reser- vations, the heist film ‘Ocean’s Twelve’ and the psychological thriller ‘Side Effects’.
In 2010, she won a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her per- formance in ‘A Little Night Music’. She has spoken publicly about her struggles with depression and bipolar disorder, and her husband Michael Douglas’ can- cer diagnosis.
Heston Blumenthal is best known for his award-winning London restaurant, The Fat Duck, and his rather terrifying appearances on the reality TV show MasterChef. He’s the man with the Midas Touch — it’s not just that his restaurants top the charts, he alchemises the food itself turning it into something that either tastes marvellously familiar but looks other-worldly, or the other way around.
The 53-year-old English restaurateur is the ultimate culinary showman, playing on childhood memories and culinary history (primarily Britain’s) to craft edible experiments. For instance, the multisensory experience he calls Sound of the Sea is seafood, seaweed, kelp arranged to resemble a strip of beach, accompanied by an iPod in a conch that plays beach sounds as you eat. On MasterChef, he’d turn up with a disarming smile and lift the cloche off what looked like the perfect orange but turned out to be a fourhour recipe involving mainly meat.
He continues to redefine how we think about what we do in the kitchen, as well as what we’re willing to try, even if just once.