CATHERINE ZETA-JONES
‘Fame nearly destroyed me’
For many Hollywood actresses, turning 50 can be scary with worries about a lack of roles and losing their looks. But Catherine Zeta-Jones says her fifties are proving to be a time of freedom, not fear, and she’s more confident than ever, thanks to her age.
The Feud star, who is 51, admits she has experienced fluctuations in confidence throughout her life. When she started out in musical theatre as a teenager, she was fearless.
“There was no questioning, wondering what people would think,” she recalls.
She was so determined and sure of herself that if she was rejected at a theatrical audition, she would go to the back of the line and audition again.
But despite her huge success in the British TV series The Darling Buds of May and Hollywood movies like The
Mask of Zorro and Entrapment, self-doubt started to creep in.
“Somewhere along the middle of my career, I got frightened again and I started to question myself as an actor, my choices,” she tells. “I lost that fearlessness.”
A return to her musical theatre roots when she played Velma Kelly in the 2002 movie musical Chicago (for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar) helped her to regain some of that lost confidence. While there have been ups and downs since, she now feels comfortable in her own skin, thanks to growing older.
“As I’ve matured as a woman, as a mother, as a wife, I’m not scared any more,” says the Welsh actress, who is married to actor Michael Douglas, 76, and mother to their children Dylan, 20, and Carys, 18.
She adds that it’s liberating not trying for the glamorous leading lady roles she was known for in her twenties, thirties and forties.
“I don’t have to worry about being the beautiful ingénue – that’s gone; the love interest – that’s gone. Now I can really start to work.”
Losing her looks is not a major concern, either. “I have my insecurities like every other woman, but as I’ve got older, I’ve got much more confident about the way I look,” Catherine confides.
Despite being labelled the most beautiful woman in the world on several occasions by the likes of People and Esquire magazines, she’s never really thought her looks are anything special.
“Well, I know I am not Quasimodo, but as far as I’m concerned, I think I’m not aesthetically beautiful. I have a broken nose. I have eczema, so I have to be careful what
I put on my face.
“I had a tracheotomy when I was 18 months old [she nearly died after a virus caused breathing difficulties] and that left me with a lot of broken capillaries in my face, which I cover with make-up. So, I would never consider myself a great beauty, but my mother always told me to make the best out of myself.”
She laughs as she recalls how her mother Patricia would tell her to make sure she was presentable every time she left the house.
“She used to say, ‘You’ll never know when you’ll meet the President of the United States.’ Which is a bizarre thing to say when you’re growing up in Wales.”
‘I don’t have to worry about being the beautiful ingénue or the love interest’
Her mother’s words came back to haunt her years later when she was in Washington DC for work and went on a tour of the White House one morning. “It was 8am, I didn’t have a scrap of make-up on my face and was wearing a baseball cap with my hair in a scrunchie.
“Then they let me take a look at the Oval Office. Bill Clinton was chipping golf balls outside and then he came in. I didn’t listen to anything he said to me, I was just thinking, ‘Oh, my God, my mother told me this and look at me, not
even a lick of mascara!’” Now she avoids leaving the house without make-up.
“I literally don’t put the bins out without mascara or a little bit of eyeliner on. I think my eyes are too small and I always try to accentuate them.”
With her lifelong passion for make-up and cosmetics, it made sense for her to include beauty products in her fashion and homewares business
Casa Zeta-Jones, which she set up 2017.
“Even if I hadn’t started my own brand, I would be making things anyway. I make curtains, cushions, I love to design. My mother was a seamstress and taught me to sew, so I’ve been wanting to do this as a creative outlet for years.”
While she may be able to sew, there was never any doubt that Catherine would make her living in the entertainment industry. She started dancing lessons at age four (paid for after her parents won $200,000 in a bingo competition) and by nine had landed a professional job in a West End production of Annie, followed by a leading role in Bugsy Malone. With the blessing of her mother and her father David, who owned a sweet factory, she left school and her home in Swansea at 15 to go to London in pursuit of a stage career.
By 17, she had the lead role in the musical 42nd Street, which brought her to the attention of TV casting directors. Landing the role of sweet-natured Mariette Larkin in The Darling Buds of May transformed her life overnight after the show became a huge hit.
“I woke up one morning and I was famous, and I didn’t know what to do with that,” says Catherine, who was 22 at the time. “It was nuts.
All of a sudden, I was getting photographed coming out of
my door and there were quirky peekaboo bikini shots of me at the beach.”
Keen to escape the media frenzy and also try her luck in movies, at 25 she headed to the US, where she found she had to effectively start from scratch.
“I went from being one of the most photographed people in Britain to walking into Warner Brothers Studios and them saying, ‘Well, what have you done?’”
It would have been easy to give up and go back to a successful TV career in Britain, but Catherine refused to let go of her dream of working in the US. “I was like, do I go back home to Wales and London with my tail between my legs because it didn’t really work out for me there? I didn’t want to do that. I never wanted to be an old grand dame actress going, ‘If only I’d gone to Hollywood, I would have been a star, darling.’ You’ve got to be in it to win it.”
Instead, she decided to treat being unknown as a way of reinventing herself and went to every casting call and audition she could, practising a range of American accents in her spare time. Her perseverance paid off when she was cast in the TV mini-series Titanic.
The show was seen by Steven Spielberg, who asked her to do a screen test for his new movie, The Mask of Zorro, which proved to be her Hollywood breakthrough.
Marrying Michael Douglas in 2000 also brought her to people’s attention. Much was made of their 25-year age gap and Catherine reflects now,
‘I woke up one morning and I was famous, and I didn’t know what to do with that’
it most likely helped her to avoid situations some other young actresses found themselves in, where they were sexually harassed or abused by powerful producers like Harvey Weinstein.
“Everyone knew that I was with Michael Douglas – I don’t know whether it was beneficial, but perhaps it meant I wasn’t in environments where I would have been vulnerable otherwise.”
There have been several periods of her life when she has stepped back from work, including when her children were small, and when Michael underwent treatment for tongue cancer, and she was then diagnosed with bipolar disorder. But now she’s enjoying the variety of roles she’s been offered, including playing Dr Vivian Capshaw in series two of TV drama Prodigal Son.
She was delighted to be cast opposite Michael Sheen, who plays serial killer Dr Martin Whitly.
“Michael is from my hometown, Swansea. My parents know his parents, Michael has met my parents and half my friends are Michael Sheen’s friends, but I had never met him,” she tells.
When they finally did meet, it was “like I’d known him all my life”, Catherine says, and they quickly slipped into telling silly jokes in their strongest Welsh accents between takes.
She’s relishing the chance to work with other actors and directors she admires, as well as produce her own movies – one she’s currently considering is the story of Hollywood icon
Lana Turner, whose teenage daughter stabbed Lana’s mobster boyfriend to death.
She has no regrets about anything she’s done in her life.
“I’m really proud of the fact that I had the balls to keep moving. I’ve always thought, I have to have the confidence to make the leap so that even if I fail, when I’m an old woman I can always say, ‘Well, I gave it my best shot.’” #