Catherine the Great

Kathy Jones. It doesn't have quite the same ring to it does it? The girl from Mumbles, West Glamorgan, took 'Zeta' from her paternal grandmother's Christian name. Her maternal grandmother was Catherine Fair, which sounds like a heroine from a lost Thomas Hardy novel, and must be considered altogether too on-the-nose.

Practically 'per-fic' in every way, Zeta Jones is the complete package: she has beauty, talent, drive, and her share of good luck. It makes you wonder why she isn't an even bigger star today. Not that an Oscar is anything to sneeze at - but No Reservations is the first film she's headlined, some ten years since she arrived in Hollywood. Compare that with what Charlize Theron has managed in much the same period, in Monster; North Country; and Aeon Flux.

Her precipitous rise to the top began with song and dance lessons at the age of four. By 15 she was a paid up member of the Actors Guild, and at 17 she was a chorus girl and second understudy to the lead in the West End revival of 42nd Street. In a stroke of luck that smacks of myth-chief she inherited the star role when both the lead and the first understudy went sick. She went on to play the role 8 times a week for the next two years… Given that this showbiz fairytale is also the hoary story of 42nd Street, maybe the whole thing was rigged.

West End stardom is one thing, but The Darling Buds Of May made her an overnight phenomenon in the UK. David Jason was the biggest star on TV at the time, but it was Catherine the tabloids went ga-ga for. 'My whole life changed in the space of an hour of TV,' she said, looking back on it. For a year, maybe more, she rivaled Princess Di as the most photographed woman in Britain. Movie-wise she had a couple of false starts; British cinema doesn't do so well by glamour girls (just ask Liz Hurley or Lena Headey). Here was a classical beauty on a par with Elizabeth Taylor or Jean Simmons, and the best the industry could offer her was Blue Juice.

In Hollywood she was an unknown quantity, but Spielberg spotted her in something and recommended director Martin Campbell audition her for The Mask Of Zorro (1998). At 28 Zeta Jones was luscious, and dark enough to pass as a Mexican spitfire. Zorro had been conceived as a vehicle for Antonio Banderas, but it was CZJ who was catapulted to fame.

Entrapment followed: a so-so heist movie that got a lift when Zeta Jones limbo danced through a forest of laser beams. Sean Connery should have been too old for her, but most agree they shared more chemistry than subsequent leading men George Clooney (Intolerable Cruelty), Tom Hanks (The Terminal), and Brad Pitt (Ocean's Twelve).

general she's been more effective on her lonesome, and never better than in Traffic as the pregnant trophy wife who fights tooth and nail to protect her material well-being, even if that means smuggling drugs across from Mexico in her kid's toys. Is the public perception of her as an ambitious and manipulative gold-digger a backhanded tribute to her effectiveness in roles like these - in Traffic, Chicago, Intolerable Cruelty and America's Sweethearts - or is she repeatedly cast this way because it reflects her personality?

This is just speculation, but I suspect that if she were as manipulative as all that she would have been more reticent about playing so many unsympathetic parts (Charlie in High Fidelity is another). Perhaps it's a sign of how our culture struggles to accommodate beauty and brains in a woman that she is repeatedly asked to play the bitch…? Things might have been different if she'd been around in the 1940s, when a screen goddess could do it all. Even a femme fatale was a role model on some subconscious level.

In her new film, No Reservations, she plays a perfectionist chef. The movie - which is aimed, primarily, at women - is based on the assumption that this is not the way to live a life; even her (female) boss insists she sees a therapist. Would we look at it the same way if the chef were a man?

Even so, the self-sufficiency CZJ embodies makes her seem cold and aloof, hard to connect with. Maybe it springs from the extraordinary media attention so early in her career. 'I built a barrier around myself,' she admitted, just to survive the tabloids. That wall could be deadly for an actress. Like many child stars, CZJ is an extraordinary technician; what's missing is warmth, vulnerability and passion, the messy, intimate stuff that comes out at some personal risk.

There are encouraging signs that she sees the problem and means to address it, both in her latest performance and in her plans to make films back home in Wales. We're told she enjoys rugby and a pint of beer at the local. If she can show us something of plain Kathy Jones she might reach another level entirely.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com