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Tonight, Catherine Zeta-Jones will return to the small screen for the FX series premiere of Feud: Bette and Joan. The anthology is based on What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? co-stars Joan Crawford and Bette Davis—played by Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon respectively—and chronicles the real-life tiff between the late Hollywood legends. Dede Gardner of Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment is an executive producer, though Zeta-Jones told Vogue she mainly signed on for the chance to work among a group of strong females. “I just wanted to be playing in their gang,” Zeta-Jones said. “As an ac-tress, we don’t always get to work with women—we usually team up with a leading man.” Zeta-Jones is cast as Olivia de Havilland, a British-American actress who rose to prominence in the 1930s and 1940s. “To work with Susan and Jessica, who are two of my all-time favorites, is a complete treat,” said Zeta-Jones, “and guess what, it turned out to be just as fabulous as I’d hoped it would be.” For her part, she was admittedly starstruck, at least at first: “It’s always a bonus when you’ve admired actors from afar, and then you meet them and go, ‘I hope they’re nice, I hope they’re great, I hope they’re cool, I hope they’re everything that I think they are,’ and I was so happy that they really were.” In honor of her latest project, here are five other things you may not have known.
1. Zeta-Jones met husband Michael Douglas at a bar. They were at the Deauville American Film Festival when Douglas found out Zeta-Jones would be there for her appearance in Zorro—so he asked his publicist to arrange an introduction over drinks. By the end of the evening, Douglas told Zeta-Jones: “I’m going to be the father of your children.” Douglas since admitted he thought “it sounded good,” but Zeta-Jones was not impressed. “She said, ‘I’ve heard a lot about you and I’ve seen a lot about you, and I think it’s time that I said goodnight.’” At that point, Douglas thought he “totally blew it,” but he sent flowers along with an apology note. “Obnoxiously so, I have to say,” Zeta-Jones later said of his pickup line that night. “What really annoys me is that he was right.”
2. After Zeta-Jones’s parents won big in a bingo competition, they enrolled her in dance lessons. The daughter of a seamstress and a factory owner, Zeta-Jones came from relatively modest beginnings; it was a lucky bingo hand (reportedly totaling more than $122,000) that helped her follow her passion. “I spent more time in front of a mirror dancing than I did in front of a desk,” Zeta-Jones has said of her childhood. Raised in Mumbles, a small fishing town outside of Swansea, Wales, Zeta-Jones dropped out of school at age 15 to join a touring production of The Pajama Game, saying, “All the gay guys in the show were my surrogate mothers.”
3. Zeta-Jones grew up idolizing Elizabeth Taylor. “My mother used to say to me, ‘She has purple eyes and two sets—two sets—of eyelashes.’ All I wanted was to see them in real life,” Zeta-Jones once recalled. And she nearly got her wish as a young girl. The story goes like this: A wee Zeta-Jones was starring in a production of Annie in London when she got word that Taylor would be arriving for the matinee of The Little Foxes. Zeta-Jones bought daffodils (the Welsh national flower), but when the car pulled up, out stepped Taylor with huge black glasses on. Zeta-Jones politely asked Ms. Taylor to remove her shades, but Taylor refused, explaining, “It’s far too early in the morning to do that, my love.” Zeta-Jones later said of the experience: “Well, she took my daffodils, anyway.”
4. Zeta-Jones can’t cook. “I make reservations; I don’t make dinner,” she once told a reporter. When asked whether she prepares meals for her two children, Zeta-Jones said: “Yes, but I wouldn’t call that cooking. I reheat.”
5. Zeta-Jones isn’t phased by the 25-year age difference between she and her husband. In fact, according to Douglas, Zeta-Jones likes to tease him about it: “[She’ll say], ‘Oh, honey, I can’t wait when you get older and you’re going to be in the wheelchair and I’m going to be wheeling you around, and you’re going to be saying, ‘Where are we going?’ and I’ll whisper it to you, ‘Cartier, darling, Cartier,’” Douglas once joked, adding, “she’s got it all figured out.”