Catherine Zeta-Jones’ favourite Bollywood movies: “We watched it so many times”
While it must be quite intimidating to be considered the most beautiful person in the world, it’s something actor Catherine Zeta-Jones has had to deal with for something close to 30 years now.
At every stage of her career, she has been described as a timeless beauty and a screen icon, which must be quite a lot to deal with if you just want to put on a face mask and watch Love Island.
From her roots in London’s West End in the late 1980s doing musical theatre productions like Annie and Bugsy Malone, she was first noticed in the early ’90s in the British Sunday tea-time series, The Darling Buds of May, which was famous for showing a fairly idyllic version of Britain that didn’t really exist and for making thousands of kids use the word ‘perfick’ in the playground on a Monday morning.
Thanks to that show, she was spotted by Hollywood and cast opposite Antonio Banderas in The Mask of Zorro in 1998, a pairing of people so hot that it set fire to cinema screens on release. It’s fair to say there was then a golden period for Zeta-Jones, where she stole the show in the likes of Entrapment in a very famous catsuit with Sean Connery, and was then brilliant as a drug lord’s wife in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic in 2000.
That was followed up with an Oscar win for her role in the steamy musical Chicago, where she made use of her singing, dancing, and acting background from back in the day. But she very nearly didn’t make it that far. Indeed, she underwent an emergency tracheotomy as a toddler, thanks to the quick thinking of an Indian doctor, a man she credits with managing to save her life.
It was an event she acknowledges led to her developing a love for Indian culture, and especially for cinema and the world of Bollywood. She says, “I have always been a huge fan of Bollywood and being a singer and dancer, I dreamt that maybe the British film industry would do the Bollywood type of films and I would be able to be cast.”
She has a couple of favourite Bollywood movies, in particular, primarily Om Shanti Om, the romantic fantasy drama from 2007 about a 1970s actor reincarnated in the present day, trying to find his murderer and, in turn, his true love. Paired with a hit soundtrack, the film became the highest-grossing Hindi movie of all time on release.
Zeta-Jones said she showed her son Om Shanti Om, revealing: “When his kid friends came over, he was like, ‘You want to see a movie from India, it’s my mom’s favorite movie’. We love it, and we watched it many times.”
She also showed love for The Lunchbox, an acclaimed 2013 indie-drama that Zeta-Jones said she discovered while on a long-haul flight, adding, “I am a big fan of that movie. It touched me in a sense of being such a quintessential Indian movie, it just touched me as an European woman so much.”
In the last ten years or so, Zeta-Jones has been quiet as she helps out her movie star husband, Michael Douglas, who has been battling throat cancer for some time. But she has made the occasional foray back onto screens with some memorable appearances in the likes of Netflix’s Wednesday as Morticia Adams, and she’ll also be starring in a series called Kill Jackie, the story of an ex-cocaine dealer who has to fend off hitmen trying to kill her after she after she made millions selling art on the black market.
