Catherine Zeta-Jones is a Welsh actress who, as of 2017, has appeared in 27 films, 8 television productions and 8 theatre productions, and is the recipient of 19 awards from 32 nominations. Her first stage appearance was at the age of nine as one of the orphan girls in a West End production of the musical Annie. She also played the title role in another production of the musical at the Swansea Grand Theatre in 1981. As a teenager, she played roles in the West End productions of Bugsy Malone and The Pajama Game, following which she had her stage breakthrough with the lead role of a chorus girl-turned-star in a 1987 production of 42nd Street.
The French-Italian fantasy feature 1001 Nights (1990) marked Zeta-Jones' film debut. She gained popularity in Britain with the role of a country girl in the television series The Darling Buds of May (1991–93)—the most watched series in the country at that time. However, disillusioned at only being offered roles of the love interest, Zeta-Jones shifted base to Los Angeles. She achieved early success by playing roles that relied significantly on her sex appeal, in the action film The Mask of Zorro (1998) and the caper thriller Entrapment (1999). The former earned her a Saturn Award for Best Actress nomination. Zeta-Jones' portrayal of a drug lord's wife in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000) gained her a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination. She then won an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing Velma Kelly in the musical Chicago (2002). As the highest-paid British actresses in Hollywood at the time, she took on the parts of a serial divorcée in Intolerable Cruelty (2003), a flight attendant in The Terminal (2004) and a Europol agent in Ocean's Twelve (2004). A sequel to The Mask of Zorro, entitled The Legend of Zorro (2005), was a failure, following which Zeta-Jones played an ambitious chef in the romantic comedy No Reservations (2007).