The story of how Catherine Zeta-Jones landed her breakout role: “I’ve got to have her”
Back in the late 1990s, Catherine Zeta-Jones was hot property to say the least.
She’d already made the unlikely jump from gentle Sunday teatime ITV telly on The Darling Buds of May to Los Angeles and TV movies but had yet to break into big movies when everything changed thanks to a certain Steven Spielberg.
It was 1996, and Spielberg had seen Zeta-Jones stand out in a pretty poorly reviewed TV mini-series about the Titanic and was about to take up an executive producer role on a forthcoming throwback epic movie called The Mask of Zorro. Antonio Banderas was already on board in the lead role, and the filmmakers were looking for an exotic leading lady, with the recent Bond girl Izabella Scorupco in pole position.
But then came Spielberg’s viewing of Titanic, and Zeta-Jones’ career and life would be massively changed forever, eventually leading to marriage to Michael Douglas and an Oscar win for Best Supporting Actress.
John Gertz was co-producer on Zorro and told Slashfilm: “Zeta-Jones, of course, was a revelation. Spielberg had discovered her, just watching TV one night. He saw her on TV and said, ‘I’ve got to have her for that role’. And that was just magnificent casting, of course… I often sat next to her on the set, talking about the weather or whatever, but not realizing at the time what a megastar she was about to turn into.”
The film was gearing up to be a Hollywood blockbuster in the way they used to make them; romance, stunts, fighting and big sets and the likes of Anthony Hopkins had also signed up. Bond movie director Martin Campbell was at the helm, and attaching Spielberg had the desired effect, with the movie grossing a quarter of a million dollars at the box office and scooping two Oscar nominations in the process.
Sean Connery was originally slated to appear in the movie but dropped out, however it didn’t stop Zeta-Jones getting to work with him as she capitalized on the new fame Zorro brought her by linking up with the Scottish legend in the heist movie Entrapment, a film that is, possibly correctly, mostly remembered for the scene in which Zeta-Jones navigates a set of infra-red bank vault lasers in a catsuit. It was another success despite some mixed reviews, and off the back of it Zeta-Jones landed the role that brought her considerable acclaim; Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic.
She earned a Golden Globe nomination for her work on that movie, a gritty crime thriller that followed drug deals from different perspectives. After that, she starred with Julia Roberts and Billy Crystal on the comedy America’s Sweethearts before her biggest hit to date arrived the following year with Chicago, the musical that paired her with Richard Gere and was a massive success commercially and with critics.
Zeta-Jones was superb as the murdering nightclub singer Velma Kelly and picked up the Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actress’, amidst the film getting six Academy Awards. After a couple of decent turns in the Coen Brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty and Tom Hanks’ The Terminal, she returned to the world of Zorro with the 2005 sequel The Legend of Zorro.
Although it reunited the original cast, Banderas included, it couldn’t match the success of the original, and reviews were poor.
