| Catherine Zeta-Jones
Zeta-Jones' stage career began in childhood. She was a part of a Catholic congregation's performing troupe before she was 10, and by 1987 she was starring in Forty-Second Street as Peggy Saywer in the West End. Once the show closed, Zeta-Jones travelled to France, where she received the lead role in French director Phillippe De Broca's 1001 Nights (a.k.a. Sheherazade), her feature film debut.
Her exotic beauty, along with her singing and dancing ability, suggested a promising future, but it was in a straight acting role, as Mariette in the successful television adaptation of H. E. Bates' The Darling Buds of May (1991), that she made her name. She became famous outside Britain after leading roles in two movies, The Mask of Zorro (1998) with Antonio Banderas and Entrapment (1999) with Sean Connery. It is said that she gained the role in Zorro after Steven Spielberg saw her performance in the Lifetime Television event of Titanic, also starring Tim Curry and Peter Gallagher.
Controversially, she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the movie Chicago in 2003. On October 22, 2005, she parodied this fact as guest host on the TV show Saturday Night Live, surrounded by four male dancers, mimicking the Bob Fosse-inspired Chicago-style dancing, suggesting in song that, no matter how bad she might be that night, "They Can't Take My Oscar Away."
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