£54m deals for Zeta-Jones

Catherine Zeta-Jones has signed a nine-film deal worth £54 million - making her Britain's highest-paid actress by far.

Ms Zeta-Jones, who joined the Hollywood elite when she married actor Michael Douglas, will make around £6 million per film. She hopes to make the movies over the next three years before having more children.

Hollywood sources today confirmed that the Swansea-born actress will more than double the £20 million contract won by British-born Frasier star Jane Leeves, which runs until 2005.

Ms Zeta-Jones will not be paid the money in one go. In recent months Ms Zeta-Jones, who became famous after starring in TV's The Darling Buds Of May and went on to make Entrapment and Traffic, has embarked on what sources are calling a "signing frenzy" - committing herself to so many films before embarking on her long-stated aim of having a large number of children with Douglas.

However, if she falls pregnant in the next three years, she risks jeopardising the contracts unlike Leeves who has made a deal with Frasier producers to write pregnancy in or out of scripts if necessary.

Ms Zeta-Jones's plans include playing sexy Velma Kelly in the big screen version of the musical Chicago with Richard Gere; producing and starring in Coming Out, about a gay Welsh rugby coach, and playing a gold digger who has an affair with George Clooney in the black comedy Intolerable Cruelty.

She will also play alongside Russell Crowe in Greekfire, the story of the love affair between Aristotle Onassis and Maria Callas; star with her husband in the courtroom movie Smoke and Mirrors and play Elizabeth Taylor in Monty, a film about tortured US movie star Montgomery Clift.

As part of the deal Ms Zeta-Jones will also star in a sequel to Mask Of Zorro with Sir Anthony Hopkins and Antonio Banderas and do a voiceover for the animated movie Sinbad. Industry insiders confirm that offers are on the table at the moment and many more are bound to pour in over the next three years.

It is understood Ms Zeta-Jones, 32, has taken on such a heavy work schedule because she fears she will suffer the same fate as other Hollywood leading ladies, whose roles dried up by the time they reached 40.

One Hollywood movie insider said: "Although nine films appears a colossal amount of work over a three-year period, when broken down into the individual periods of time she would spend on any one set, it's easy to see how the work can be fitted in. She would never be required on set for more than two or three weeks at any one time and production of films would overlap so she could be flying in between locations of films being made concurrently."

Ms Zeta-Jones's first big break came at the age of 10 as the Star Act Of The Year 1980 in the Butlin's Junior Star Trail, a nationwide talent contest. She was presented with a cup, a certificate and £250 cheque by Billy Butlin's son Bobby.

She fulfilled her first ambition of appearing in a West End play soon after when she played an orphan in Annie. More theatre work was followed by the hit ITV series The Darling Buds Of May, when, at 22, the girl from Mumbles became a household name in the UK, as David Jason's voluptuous daughter.

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