Name: Catherine
Zeta-Jones
Date of Birth: September 25, 1969
Birthplace: Swansea, West Glamorgan, Wales
Occupation: Actress
Marital Status: Single
Height: 5ft 8ins
"My mother's Irish and my father's Welsh," she says fo her family " But, we've tried to track our family back, and we're blocked. We're at a crossroads down there after my great-great-grandfather, and no one seems to know anything."
Catherine's father ran the town confectionery, prompting her to recall, "It was like growing up in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory country."
"I was 15 when I got my (professional actor's) card," recalls the Welsh actress. "I was born and raised in the small Welsh town of Swansea. It's such a small town that the school is really an old house, but it has the distinction of being the birthplace of (poet) Dylan Thomas."
Though it was a very small town, Catherine was singing and dancing by the time she was four.
"Our local Catholic church had a very active amateur drama group. We all learned singing, dancing and performing."
As a child, she starred in Annie and at the tender age of 10, she played Talullah in a theatrical production of Bugsy Malone. When Catherine was 14, former Monkees star Mickey Dolenz was touring Britain in a musical that required the participation of local teens in each city it visited. She auditioned for the Welsh version of the show and won a chorus spot. She so impressed the producers that they whisked her off to London to star in a production of The Pyjama Game. Catherine moved to London from her native South Wales when she turned 15.
By the time she was 17, Catherine had the lead in the British revival of 42nd Street. She was originally cast as the second understudy for the lead role in the musical 42nd Street, which entailed a grueling schedule. "I didn't know anybody," she says shrugging. "I trained in the morning, then went to the theater and did the show, went to bed and got up and did it again."
Her diligence paid off when both the star and first understudy were absent the night the play's producer, David Merrick, was in the audience. "After that," Catherine recalls, "I was playing the lead, eight shows a week."
"I never saw movies in my future so when 42nd Street closed, off I went to France. ( Where she made her film debut in French director Philip de Broca's 1990 film Scheherazade. ) I returned home a year later because I was offered a role in a TV series called The Darling Buds of May." This British comedy-drama from Yorkshire Television was based on the novel by H.E. Bates.