![]() ![]() 'I drive a Range Rover with a cellphone, and if you need to reach me you can page me, beep me, fax me or email me. 'I'm the ultimate Hollywood babe,' she said. Zeta Jones, confused in Britain in 1996 and unsure when she first hit Hollywood, has, with a little help from a top Californian publicist, got her image under control. Both films have a nicely self-deprecating air, too: everyone's in on the joke, except those pointy-headed critics who want to take it so seriously. Her role opposite Sean Connery in Entrapment is a variation on that theme: suggestive but not explicit high on sheen, low on substance, and with a starring role for her spray-on catsuit. That someone was Steven Spielberg she was invited to test for Zorro (he was executive producer), landed the part, gelled with Antonio Banderas and had found her niche as a rumbustious, sensual heroine ideally suited to mildly vacuous actioners in which sex is a given that is rarely taken. The Phantom was followed by an appalling CBS mini-series about the Titanic, but one of its few viewers saw something in her performance. She overcame that isolation, however, and knew how to choose her friends. There were lots of times when I said, "What am I doing here?" I didn't know anyone I was on my own.' If it had not worked by then I would come home. You've got to give it a go." After I finished The Phantom I had about 10 months left on the work permit and I set that as a time limit. 'The Phantom gave me the chance to go to America, and when that happened I thought, "Right, someone is telling you something here. 'I was at such a low ebb, personally and professionally,' she said. The turnround began with her move to the US to make The Phantom in 1996. 'And I suppose it gives me a little bit of "well, up yours, I'll show you" kind of attitude.' 'I don't dwell on it, but those people who said I couldn't do it were a bit of an incentive,' she said last week. As a teenager Zeta Jones got her break in the musical 42nd Street now she has turned that zero-to-hero plotline into reality. The critics remain largely unconvinced, but who's reading the notices? Entrapment (opening here this weekend) has been dismissed as preposterous, a 'no-brainer', and Zeta Jones called 'plasticky', but who cares? It has grossed more than $80 million in the US, is set to do well here, and has confirmed her elevation from Hollywood hopeful to major player that began with The Mask of Zorro. ![]() At 29, she is a screen goddess, on Hollywood's A-list and commanding £5 million a film. Not a carrot or Blue Peter presenter in sight. Interviewed by Clive James and Des O'Connor on the cover of Hello! adored by the lads' mags cavorting with Michael Douglas and, in a triumphant twist on the old headline, admired as 'The darling bud of LA' in the Times. Three years on, Zeta Jones is everywhere. 'I have always worked as a jobbing actress and that is what I am doing at the moment,' she told an interviewer. At 26, five years after The Darling Buds of May, she was over the hill, apparently destined for more cinema openings and occasional appearances on daytime TV.
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