Catherine Zeta Jones: the evergreen girl of the valleys

Catherine Zeta-Jones - Oscar-winner, married into Hollywood royalty and now a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list - owes her success to endlessly reinventing herself, says Sheila Johnston

From YTV REPEAT - THE DARLING BUDS OF MAY Monday 2 June 2003 at 9.00pm on ITV1 Network Series 1 Pop Larkin [David Jason], Ma Larkin [Pam Ferris], Charley [Philip Franks], Mariette Larkin [Catherine Zeta Jones]. Copyright Yorkshire Television.

There are many excellent reasons why Catherine Zeta-Jones deserves the CBE she received yesterday in the Queen's Birthday Honours list. The official citation refers to "services to the film industry and to charity", and there's no arguing with that Academy Award, for the movie version of Chicago, or the long list of fine causes she supports, which includes Cinema for Peace, the NSPCC and the Children's Hospital in Cardiff. But there is much, much more to Zeta-Jones. She is a force to be reckoned with.

She has her long career on television and stage – she is currently starring in the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music – and a happy 10-year marriage to Hollywood royalty (her husband is the 65-year-old actor-producer Michael Douglas, with whom she has two children, Dylan Michael, 9, and Carys Zeta, 7).

But most of all, Zeta-Jones is the ultimate self-made success: the working-class girl from the Welsh valleys who has paid her dues in showbusiness, worked like a trooper with single-minded dedication, constantly made bold decisions, and scrubbed up very nicely into a luscious star who radiates a classic, rather old-fashioned brand of big-screen glamour. Some critics have carped that she's not much cop as an actress, but she has made the very most of her talent. And she has other strings to her bow: Sir Trevor Nunn, the director of A Little Night Music, describes her as "a song-and-dance girl, a real theatre animal".

Zeta Jones was born in Swansea in 1969 to a sweet-factory owner and a seamstress. The hyphen arrived later and was the first of many self-reinventions; the middle name Zeta comes from her paternal grandmother and has helped to lend her a very un-British exoticism, although her brunette looks and generous curves (gratifyingly, she claims not to diet) scarcely fit the contemporary Californian template.

At five, she began dance classes, and became a British tap-dancing champion by the time she was 11, having already appeared in the title role in a Swansea production of Annie. She left school with no O-levels, studied drama in London and then, aged 17, had a classic star-is-born moment – so the legend has it – when, in the West End revival of 42nd Street, both the leading actress and her understudy fell ill and she was promoted from the chorus line.

The role that turned Zeta-Jones into a household name was on television, as Mariette in the 1991 ITV adaptation of HE Bates's bucolic comedy The Darling Buds of May. After that, she suffered the merciless glare of tabloid attention, and her lively love life was subjected to keen scrutiny (she was linked to escorts ranging from David Essex and Mick Hucknall to the actors Angus MacFadyen and Paul McGann).

It was all a little grubby, as tabloid celebrity in Britain is prone to be. But Zeta-Jones was already setting her sights elsewhere. She went to France in 1990 to launch a new movie career, as Scheherazade in Les Mille et Une Nuits, a silly oriental fantasy that involved nudity and bad reviews.

Today, her rise seems smooth and effortless, and it's easy to forget the long bad patch she ploughed through in the 1990s. She cut a couple of forgettable records and appeared in a suite of flops, including the dismal Eric Idle comedySplitting Heirs, a British surfing movie, Blue Juice, and an Indiana Jones knock-off called The Phantom. A has-been before she was 30, she appeared, if at all, in magazines under headlines such as "People In Trouble" or "Where Are They Now?"

But Zeta-Jones kept fighting. And, like so many before her, she found America the perfect place to reinvent herself. "When I went to the States, I didn't have that [tabloid] baggage," she said. "I could start afresh." And it was here that she had her third major break, once again stepping into the shoes of another actress.

Cameron Diaz had turned down the female lead in The Mask of Zorro (1998), and the director, Martin Campbell, was casting around for a replacement. Steven Spielberg had seen Zeta-Jones in a television film about the Titanic and recommended her. Her role involved being disrobed by the Spanish heart-throb du jour, Antonio Banderas, with his fencing rapier. Critics reached for adjectives such as "ravishing", "sultry" and "electric".

The following year, she donned a Lycra catsuit to bewitch Sean Connery in the heist drama Entrapment, another gleaming showcase for her feline elegance and agility. Zeta-Jones was, in all senses, hot again. And then she made possibly her most surprising move of all.

In the late summer of 1998, she was introduced to Michael Douglas at the Deauville Film Festival in Normandy, and entered a new, high-stakes phase of her life. The risk was not just the age difference of 25 years (they share the same birthday: September 25), or the fact that Douglas, who was still married to his wife of 23 years, Diandra Luker, had been treated for alcohol abuse in the early 1990s. Or that Zeta-Jones was now half of a Hollywood power couple, a type of union that usually attracts a spectacular rate of attrition. When they met, he was the senior partner and she was the trophy girlfriend. How easily her star could have been eclipsed by his.

Yet the opposite transpired. Dylan was born in August 2000, and three months later, shortly after Douglas was divorced by his first wife, the pair married. And Zeta-Jones's career achieved lift-off, with films for Steven Soderbergh (Trafficand Ocean's Twelve), Stephen Frears (High Fidelity), the Coen brothers (Intolerable Cruelty, co-starring George Clooney) and Steven Spielberg (The Terminal).

You wouldn't want to take the comparison too far, but there was an overlap of sorts between Zeta-Jones's own story and that of her character in Chicago: the vampish, ruthlessly ambitious Velma Kelly, nightclub singer and tabloid darling. But the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress was an unarguable mark of peer-group recognition (Zeta-Jones gave birth to her daughter nine days after taking ownership of the statuette), and the robust box-office performance of Chicagogave the lie to the then-current wisdom that movie musicals always flop. Her range might not be vast, but it comfortably encompasses bodice-rippers, romantic comedies and action movies.

Despite the doomsayers, the marriage has endured; in fact the age difference may even have worked in their favour. These days Douglas is content to motor along quietly (his new film, the sequel to Wall Street, opens in the summer) and take receipt of Lifetime Achievement awards, while his wife's high profile adds lustre to his fading sheen. "We're not vying for equal rights in our careers," she has said. (They have never worked together: while both had roles in Traffic, they shared no common scenes.) The family lives quietly on their estate in Bermuda, and Cameron, Douglas's son by his first marriage, describes Zeta-Jones as a warm, down-to-earth "normal mum".

Zeta-Jones's next gambit will be fascinating to watch. The Broadway run of A Little Night Music – for which she was nominated for a Tony award despite mixed reviews – ends next week. A new rom-com, The Rebound, opens in July. In it, the age difference works in the opposite direction, with Zeta-Jones's cougar paired with the 25-year-old Justin Bartha. She may have turned 40, but today that's no barrier at all to maintaining one's sex appeal. There has been talk of a musical remake of Cleopatra and, if ever an actress were built for the Elizabeth Taylor role in 3D, it is Zeta-Jones.

Whatever she does next, we must expect the unexpected.