Catherine Zeta Jones Biography

Name:Catherine Zeta Jones 
Date of Birth:Sept. 25, 1969
Place of Birth:Swansea, Wales


Welsh-born actress who demonstrated her versatility in a wide range of films, most notably the musical Chicago (2002), for which she won the Academy Award for best supporting actress.

Jones (Zeta was her middle name; she added the hyphen later) was the daughter of Irish and Welsh parents. Zeta-Jones performed with her church's amateur theatre group as a child and soon secured the starring role in the troupe's production of Annie. When she was 13 years old, she won first prize in a national tap-dancing competition. At age 15 she quit school and moved to London to pursue a career in acting. Zeta-Jones first major onstage role came two years later in a West End revival of the musical 42nd Street when both the lead and the first understudy for the role were unable to perform; the producer of the musical then made her the lead for the remainder of the production run. It was not until she landed the role of Mariette Larkin in the popular British television comedy-drama series The Darling Buds of May during the early 1990s, however, that Zeta-Jones became well known in England. Zeta-Jones  popularity made her a frequent target of the media; after a particularly harrowing incident in which she drove her car into a lamppost while trying to elude the paparazzi, Zeta-Jones moved to the United States.f

Zeta-Jones relocated to Los Angeles but initially found it difficult to gain a foothold in Hollywood films. Zeta-Jones  starred instead in made-for-television movies. Zeta-Jones performance in one such project, the miniseries Titanic, caught the eye of director Steven Spielberg, who thought she would be suitable for a leading role in his then-upcoming production of The Mask of Zorro (1998). After this breakthrough, Zeta-Jones went on to star opposite Sean Connery in the thriller Entrapment (1999) and to portray the wife of a drug dealer in Steven Soderbergh's Oscar-winning drama Traffic (2000). Zeta-Jones appeared in the romantic comedy High Fidelity in 2000, the same year she married actor Michael Douglas.