Catherine: born to be a 'star'

10 April 2012

When Catherine Zeta-Jones was 17 she attracted an older man.

As she hoofed and sang away in the lead of the West End show 42nd Street, 73-year-old William McFann sat in the audience and was convinced he'd spotted a megastar in the making. He sent her notes and gifts, and once Catherine had decided he was harmless, she accepted them. He went back home to America and he sent her a huge oil painting of Hollywood stars. One day, my dear, was the message, you too will be one of these. He wasn't wrong.

Catherine Zeta-Jones, a girl who looks as if she was born purring, has achieved an extraordinary apotheosis. Not since Richard Burton married Elizabeth Taylor has an ambitious Welsh actor swept away so many glittering prizes, dramatic, financial, matrimonial, social. Her wedding to Michael Douglas was infinitely more spectacular than Posh and Becks with their double throne, though, like them, the baby came too.

The girl from Mumbles, Swansea, smiled her cat-got-the-cream smile at UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan, Art Garfunkel and Jack Nicholson. The whole Douglas clan were there.

She wore Christian Lacroix and so did the bridesmaids.

And when I read that a Welsh choir sang Ar Hyd Y Nos and Cwm Rhondda, well, I nearly cried, but, then, I am Welsh.

To cap it all her latest film, Traffic, has got proper, respectful reviews and so has she. Steven Spielberg star-spotted her for The Mask of Zorro and she's being talked of as the next James Bond. This is a Catherine Zeta-Jones moment. But it's not the first.

The first Catherine Zeta-Jones moment came when she was a tot of 18 months and had to have a tracheotomy. Drama. Lights. Scalpel. She survived, but she still has the scar.

The next Catherine Zeta-Jones moment came when she was four and she sang into the flex of her granny's kettle. Yes, a show-off was born. But every show-off needs a strong setting and Catherine had hers in her family. No Jones family, no Hollywood star. Even at the age of four they saw they had something that needed nurturing and promoting. After all, she was born in a culture that produced Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey and Bryn Terfel. In England, they tell a precocious child to shut up. In Wales, they give them a big kiss and teach them another song.

So the Jones family toured Catherine round the Welsh working-men's clubs and Catherine dreamed of being an actress, a singer, a star. She had a record of Shirley Bassey's greatest hits and learned them all by heart. She won the Butlin's Star Trail at the age of 10. She starred in Bugsy Malone and was told off by the director for being too sexy at the age of 13. I can imagine just how awful she might have been, gyrating and belting away on stage. I wonder, too, how much of a childhood was given over to the urgent need to perform. But there's no doubt that she was the motor who drove the Jones family into helping her career, as they still do. Her brothers and her father work for her, making a little Welsh mafia of mutual trust and support.

Just as she was about to take her GCSEs, she was offered a part in a touring production of The Pyjama Game. She went to her head teacher, Aled Thomas, and asked if she could bunk off school. In England he would have told her not to be a silly girl and that exams were far more important. In Wales he said, go for it, and, at her wedding to Michael Douglas, he told the assembled stars that he had known and admired Catherine since she was six.

Those 12 years, between impromptu performing at four and leaving school to tour at 16, weren't just spent dreaming. She really worked at it.

Catherine's dance teacher Hazel Johnson said: "In all my years of teaching I've never seen a child like her. She just practised and practised."

"She's always had this drive," says her younger brother Lyndon Jones, who is director of development for Catherine's new company Milkwood Films (get the local Dylan Thomas reference). "When Catherine went on stage, it was like a tiger coming out in her. That was her territory. It's the fire within, and Catherine's always had that."

There was a famous Pears soap ad when Catherine was a little girl with the catchline, "Preparing to be a beautiful lady". That was Catherine. Do you think the stardom, the marriage came by luck or accident? She's been single-minded all her life, so single-minded that when she got to 17 and found herself, in classic showbiz tradition, taking on the lead of a West-End musical, she found herself stymied. She'd got there, and so soon.

The dream had come true, so what could the new dream be?

But showbiz, and life, are about ups and downs. For every gleaming moment there must be a period in outer darkness. Though it must be said that Catherine Zeta-Jones's moments in outer darkness have been few, and lit by tabloid flashbulbs, and even then, by sheer grit, she has hauled herself out of them and trudged on, onward and upward.

The stage isn't where it's at any more. She may have starred in a West-End musical at 17, and that might have made her famous in the 1930s or 1940s - after all, Catherine Zeta-Jones is an old-fashioned girl, a Hollywood throwback - but it takes television to make a household name. Mariette in HE Bates's¸ The Darling Buds of May is a rural sexbomb, a creamy, luscious honeypot of sensuality and innocence. Catherine became Mariette and the tabloids discovered Catherine. She was 22.

She had another ambition as well as stardom and that was to marry and have children. Television and tabloid fame coincided with some unhappy attempts at finding Mr Right. Catherine had been so busy hoofing and hollering that her love life seemed to have been on hold, a pattern which persisted. For someone so gorgeous, her relationships with men didn't seem to have been that successful. Blue Peter presenter John Leslie, actor Angus McFadyen passed through her life. For a while Catherine Zeta-Jones was in danger of becoming tabloid fodder, a media tragedy.

Look at her, gleaming and glowing in her couture dresses, groomed into a convincing facsimile of the great Hollywood stars of the past. A touch of Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth, a flash of Grace Kelly or Lauren Bacall.

Catherine Zeta-Jones Douglas has found her style and it's haute glamour, high maintenance. She doesn't have the hippy eccentricity of a Helena Bonham Carter, the wholesome, down-the-pub rosiness of Kate Winslet. She's a throwback, and it suits her. But look at the tabloid spreads of a decade ago.

Who is this rather tarty-looking totty in her black basque and diamanté choker, posing open-mouthed by the headline: "Why Zeta can't keep her men"? Who can they mean when they write articles titled, "Catherine the great flop"? "Budding career of the Jones girl starts to come apart in an epic fashion," gloats the sub-heading. "Wrong Men. Wrong parts." It's at moments like these that a girl shows

her true metal. Catherine didn't spend her childhood charming Welsh miners and aping Shirley Bassey for nothing. She didn't build the Jones family into a fighting machine to give up now. It was this moment, not the West-End stardom, that presented her with the true test. She could go down the trying-to-please-the-tabloids route, get a part in a soap and get photographed at parties. Or she could say goodbye to the lot of them and go West, which she did. Catherine the Quite Famous went to Hollywood with the deliberate, clear-eyed intention of joining the anonymous line-up of beautiful, desperate girls who wanted to make it in movies.

"It was very humbling for me," she says now. "Coming to LA and making the decision to become anonymous and start again. Of course, in those moments of premenstrual hell, I questioned my being here. I'd be on the phone to my mother at four o'clock in the morning, saying: "What am I doing here? I hate it."

It worked, of course. It's not enough to be beautiful. It's not enough to be professional. It's not enough to be ambitious. It's not enough to be teeth-grittingly persistent. It's not enough to be charming. But it helps to be all five. And when the persistence and charm get you the test, and then the camera loves you, that's when the spark of luck flies. A part in a TV soap. A sighting by Steven Spielberg. A tip to the director of The Mask of Zorro, and bingo. It helps that when Catherine is on set, everyone, from Antonio Banderas to Sean Connery, raves about her professionalism. What do they expect? It's what she's been doing since she was four.

"The reason I get on with Sean Connery so well," she says, "is that we both want to rehearse after we have finished shooting, even if we both have to be back on set in five hours. We love the craft - it's a working-class idea of acting. It justifies the amount we get paid."

And then there's the handsome prince. Michael Douglas, prince of Hollywood, if a tad mature. But she didn't do well with the young lads. Older men have always liked her, and she likes them. The glamour, the high maintenance would be a bit wasted on a boy. If ever a girl was born to be spoiled and treated like a queen, Catherine Zeta-Jones is it.

But the Zeta-Jones story isn't going to stop with the conventional happy ending, even in Hollywood. Marriage wasn't really what she went there for, though it's a plus. One minute she's cooing about the pleasures of breast-feeding and raving about the effect on flattening her stomach. The next minute she's quit the breast-feeding after two months. Time to get back to work.

Can she sustain this incredible high? Why not? It's built on very long-established, secure foundations. Will her marriage last? Does it matter? She has a tight pre-nuptial agreement. She's becoming rich in her own right. She will never, ever, be poor. As her husband ages, could she fall for a younger man and leave him? It's possible. Michael Douglas is obviously dotty about his beautiful, smart, young bride, but she's demonstrated that when things aren't going her way, she's quite prepared to pull up all her roots and march off to a new territory and start again. Maybe it's this flint-like self-belief, energy and determination that has given her the leverage in marriage to a much older, much more powerful man. When he asked if she wanted to redecorate their various lovely homes, she said coolly, "I don't do houses."

The only thing she reinvents and restyles is herself. Whatever drives her - and only she knows the nature of the tiger within - Catherine Zeta-Jones has lived life on her own terms since she was four. She certainly won't stop now.

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