The Zeta Factor
Source: Elle December IssueShe sings. She dances. She taps. In fact, Catherine Zeta-Jones Rocks.
The American perception of Catherine Zeta-Jones goes something like this: In four years, she zipped her way up from an exotic newcomer to a glamorous A-list movie star who married another A-list star, Michael Douglas. With the birth of their son, Dylan, in August 2000, this princess from Wales provided an heir to one of Hollywood’s royal families. And in October, the couple announced that another (surely) dimpled child is on the way. Just like that. Because some people have all the luck, right?
Of course, luck had very little to do with it. By the time Zeta-Jones arrived in Los Angeles in the mid-’90s to break into American movies, she had already spent nearly twenty years singing, dancing, acting, and doing whatever else it took to hoist her star upward.
Catherine Jones (she began using her grandmother’s unforgettable name, Zeta, because another actress was already using hers) always wanted to be center stage. The middle child (between two brothers) of a candy-factory owner and a homemaker, she grew up in the seaside town of Mumbles, Wales, and began taking dance lessons at age four. By eleven, she was the national tap-dancing champion of Great Britain. A few years later, after chorus parts in several musicals, fifteen-year-old Jones left school with her family’s blessing and moved to London, by herself, to start working full-time at becoming a star. (She would encourage her children to do the same: "You know what?" she imagines telling them one day. "Your genes were not meant to go to college. Your genes were meant to go on the screen.") Her first break came at seventeen, when, in a West End production of 42nd Street, life imitated art: On a night the show’s producer, David Merrick, happened to be in the audience, Zeta-Jones, the secondunderstudy for the lead, took the stage and stole the show, literally-Merrick recast the production, and Zeta-Jones starred for the rest of the run. She had what amounted to a superb second act in 1991, as the supervixen daughter on the British nighttime soap The Darling Buds of May. With the hit series, she became-and still is-the darling of the British press, setting off a mediamania comparable to America’s absorption with, say, Jennifer Aniston. And when life in that petri dish got to be too much, when the roles didn’t pour in after Darling Buds, Zeta-Jones once again picked up and moved-this time to L.A., to seek out a new act on a bigger stage: Hollywood.
Zeta-Jones enters the Consort Bar at Toronto’s King Edward hotel precisely at the appointed hour. Her long, raven hair has blond highlights, and she shakes hands like a businessman who’s just sealed a deal. Her watered-down Welsh accent is seductively soothing, and for a woman who can deliver both intense heat and an icy chill onscreen, she’s surprisingly silly and self-deprecating. As she curls up on the couch, her blinding engagement ring is a distraction-a 10-carat marquise-cut diamond, the size of a large almond; it’s a wonder she can lift it.
She and Douglas are in Toronto because he’s filming The Wedding Party (a remake of The In-Laws) and she’s doing reshoots for this month’s Chicago, the movie musical that will finally allow American audiences to see the singing and dancing sensation who conquered England
She doesn’t play the lead (that would be Renée Zellweger), but Zeta-Jones’s performance commands full attention. Her Velma Kelly-an infamous ‘20s nightclub singer who puts a few slugs in her husband and her sister when she catches them in the middle of their own act-comes across like a vampy Lady Brett Ashley hot-wired with Ethel Merman and Cyd Charisse. But what’s fascinating is how the nearly naked Zeta-Jones uses her own awfully naked ambition to play the role. When Zellweger’s Roxie Hart (who offs a no-good lover and winds up in the same cellblock) starts stealing Velma’s headlines, hell hath no fury like a woman bumped off the front page: No ingenue’s stepping into her spotlight. Hit it, boys!
But Zeta-Jones’s real-life moxie didn’t help the thirty-three-year-old lose twelve years of dancing rust in rehearsals. "It was like, Why am I doing this after having a baby?" she says with a laugh. "You’ve got these girls from New York, and we were doing kicks next to them. Your leg comes to here, and they’re knocking themselves out." She was not to be upstaged by background hoofers, and in the end, Zeta-Jones is the dancer you can’t take your eyes off.
"She was my rock, my cheerleader," says Chicago director Rob Marshall. "She would watch [co-stars] Richard Gere and Renée Zellweger’s numbers and cheer. And they looked at her like, She’s the pro."
Douglas was Zeta-Jones’s cheerleader. "It was great to see her use all that experience," he says. "I saw the joy in her." Of course, she’s given him a few private performances at home. "One of the first times we got together," he says, "I had her get a pair of tap shoes and dragged her into the bathroom." It’s not as kinky as it sounds-he didn’t want her tearing up his wooden floors. "And just to listen to the jazz of her tapping, it was incredible."
While Douglas says he’s impressed by his wife’s range of roles after such a short time in Hollywood-from swordfighting in The Mask of Zorro to ordering a hit as a drug lord’s pregnant wife in Traffic--he does have his own ideas of what she should do next: He wants to see her play vulnerable (Catherine Zeta-Jones is, cough, Camille!?), and he wants her to turn up the heat. "My husband keeps telling me, ‘You’ve gotta do your red-hot -sexy-mama movie soon, baby,’" she says.
Excuse me? Exactly when has Catherine Zeta-Jones not played a red-hot sexy mama? Did Douglas see Entrapment? And would taking that image to the extreme mean nude scenes that Dylan might someday have to fast-forward through? "You know, it’s gonna be hard for him anyway, because he’s got his dad’s ass to deal with!" Zeta-Jones says. "So I just feel like I’m the nun in this relationship, you know?" She cracks up at the thought of her children seeing their racier films: "Yeah, that’s Daddy’s ass, and those are Mama’s boobies-and that guy’s a total stranger. So don’t get screwed up about this!"
Douglas tries to clarify his hard-to-defend red-hot-sexy-mama theory: "I think she has an inherent sexuality, but she hasn’t done a hot one-on-one lovemaking role." In other words, he wants to watch his wife get it on in the kind of movie that usually stars . . . Michael Douglas? Yes, but don’t look for them in Marital Attraction; both say they’d never film a love story together (as Douglas puts it, "Audiences don’t want to see that. . . . They’d rather see us battling each other").
Zeta-Jones’s onscreen sexiness is accompanied by an inherent maturity. In a universe of It Girls, she has always seemed the grown-up-even in Zorro, her coming-out film at age twenty-eight, she was more of an It Woman, if not a time traveler from Hollywood’s Golden Age. "She’s very aware of her beauty," Zorrov co-star Sir Anthony Hopkins says of Zeta-Jones, the face of Elizabeth Arden. "She uses it, doesn’t hide it. Just like all of the great old stars." Joe Roth, director of America’s Sweethearts, concurs: "We had to find someone John Cusack would choose over Julia Roberts. And there are only a handful of actresses who fit that bill." And only a handful of men who can hold their own beside such a self-possessed woman. Which may also explain why, in real life, Zeta-Jones has chosen a role opposite Douglas, twenty-five years her senior (to the day).
The two joke about the age difference. "The only time we really sat down and discussed it was when we thought about having children," Zeta-Jones says. "He said, ‘Look, honey. You can’t push me around and a stroller-it’s not good.’" But, she says, tilting her head, "I’d say, ‘You know, when you’re in the wheelchair, I’m gonna get you a ni-i-ice cashmere blanket, and we’re gonna go straight to Tiffany, darling-you’re gonna be very well looked after.’ And then he did this impression: ‘Where are we going, honey?’"She cups her hands to her mouth and shouts, "‘Tiffany, honey-Tiffany.’"
In the upcoming Coen brothers movie, Intolerable Cruelty, with George Clooney, Zeta-Jones tweaks this caricature of herself, that she married for money. She becomes giddy acting out the inevitable press junket for that film: "It’s like, ‘So let’s talk about the movie. You’re a gold-digger; you have a few husbands; and you start duping ‘em. Is there anything in yourself you brought to this character?’" She answers herself: "‘Oh, it’s completely me. I want the world to know that I married Michael Douglas for this very reason!’" She smiles, pleased with her riff. You get the sense that she really will be a smartass when the time comes. Yes, she’s sticking her chin out, but that’s what she’s done her entire career.
And that may be a clue to Zeta-Jones’s next act, a professional challenge that will surely have critics locked and loaded: "I’m a complete frustrated lounge act," she says without irony. "I really want to do a show in Vegas-it’s like my last bastion." She laughs. "But I don’t know if the world’s ready for it now. I have to plan it." And you know she will.