The thing to remember about Catherine Zeta-Jones is that she wears high-heels everywhere, even to climb the 72 steps leading up to the Edinburgh Castle, the city's top tourist attraction.
The day after the actress donned three-inch spikes to scale the stone fortress, she was still being teased about her unconventional fashion choice by her "Entrapment" co-star -- and Edinburgh's most famous native son -- Sean Connery.
"Well," sighs the actress, "Sean didn't tell me it was going to be such a tempestuous climb to the top. But what can I say? I always wear heels."
Zeta-Jones always wears make-up and stylish clothes too. On screen as well as off, she seems to be a throwback to the glamour queens of Hollywood's golden age. As "Entrapment" director Jon Amiel sees it, Zeta-Jones has more in common with such '40s and '50s bombshells as Lana Turner and Ava Gardner than present-day ingenues like Winona Ryder and Gwyneth Paltrow.
"Catherine is the most flamboyantly sexual woman on the screen at the moment," says the filmmaker. "She's just so confident in her own sexuality. She has none of the gamine-ish, flat-chested, boy/ girl coyness of so many actresses today. She is happy to take the screen as a sexual woman in full bloom. But it's not the sleazy, watch-me-uncross-my-legs sexuality of a Sharon Stone either. Catherine just takes delight in her own voluptuousness."
Today, as she relaxes in a suite in Edinburgh's Caledonian Hotel, Zeta-Jones is hiding her voluptuousness beneath a sleeveless black linen dress and a multi-colored shawl. She can't disguise her beauty, though. Blessed with long flowing black locks and fiery eyes, the actress draws stares as she and her look-alike brother stride through the lobby together.
"I love it when people tell me I remind them of an old-time movie star," admits the actress who is best known for matching swords with Antonio Banderas in 1998's "The Mask of Zorro." "What I admire about the women in '40s and '50s movies is that they were allowed to be pretty and have a brain too.
"In my favorite movies by Hitchcock, women are smart, funny and sophisticated. Think of Grace Kelly or Ingrid Bergman. Women were allowed to have style as opposed to the grunge look that's in now, where everybody looks like they've slept under a bridge. Today, beauty is seen as shallow and fluffy. What I want to do is play characters who are attractive and strong."
Zeta-Jones is off to a good start with "Entrapment." The movie, which opened Friday, is a glossy trifle about globe-trotting master thieves playing with cool gadgets, but she more than holds her own with Connery, who's done this kind of thing before.
Even before the picture's release, eyebrows were raised at the pairing of the 68-year-old Connery with the 29-year-old Zeta-Jones. After all, she was 7 when he was 007. Isn't that pushing the notion of a May/December romance to its breaking point?
Zeta-Jones agrees that initially the decades-wide age gap gave her pause. "Any fears I might have had disappeared the moment I met Sean," she recalls. "There was immediate chemistry and attraction between us. I figured if it worked for us in reality, it would also work in front of the camera."
Connery, who produced the movie and handpicked Zeta-Jones for the role, agrees. He flew her out to Rome to meet with him and after reading three short scenes and chatting with her for an hour, he sensed he'd found his leading lady.
"I knew instantly Catherine was right for the role," he says. "If I had had any reservations about our having the right screen presence, I would have simply produced the movie and gotten someone else to star in it.
"I'll know when it's time for me to say no and to finally stand down. But it was pretty clear something was working for us from the moment we met. My instinct and intuition told me Catherine could make this work. ... She has wit, style and a beauty that transcends age."
"Entrapment" isn't Zeta-Jones' only new movie. In July, she will co-star opposite Lili Taylor, Liam Neeson and Owen Wilson in "The Haunting," a remake of the 1963 chiller with Claire Bloom and Julie Harris. And later this month, she will begin filming "High Fidelity," a comedy for Stephen Frears starring John Cusack.
"We're shooting it in Chicago and I can't wait to get there and check out the blues clubs," says the actress who claims she'd give it all up to sing background for Gladys Knight. "I'd have a sex-change to be a Pip."
While Zeta-Jones never crooned in a rhythm & blues group, she did spend nearly a decade earning a living as a musical comedy performer. Born in the small fishing village of Swansea, Wales, the daughter of a seamstress-mother and candy factory manager-father began acting with the Dylan Thomas Theater Group when she was 10. At 11, she landed the lead in a West End production of "Annie."
