Zeta-Jones received critical acclaim for her performances as a vengeful pregnant woman in Traffic (2000) and Velma Kelly in the musical Chicago (2002), winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the latter.

Parts in smaller-scale features were followed by a decrease in workload, during which she returned to the stage and played an aging actress in a Broadway production of A Little Night Music (2009), winning a Tony Award.

Catherine Zeta-Jones was born on 25 September 1969 in Swansea, South Wales, to David Jones, the owner of a sweet factory, and his wife Patricia (née Fair), a seamstress.

[5] Zeta-Jones participated in school stage shows from a young age and gained local media attention when her rendition of a Shirley Bassey song won a Junior Star Trail talent competition.

[12] At age nine, Zeta-Jones was selected to play July, one of the orphan girls in the original West End production of the musical Annie,[13] and in her early teens, she became a national tap dancing champion.

[10] When she was fifteen, Zeta-Jones left school without obtaining O-levels and decided to live in London to pursue a full-time acting career; she was also engaged to perform in a touring production of The Pajama Game.

An adaptation of the Persian fable One Thousand and One Nights, the French-Italian production recounts the tale from the perspective of Scheherazade (Zeta-Jones), one of the brides of King Sharir (Thierry Lhermitte).

[12][22] Following a brief appearance as Beatriz Enríquez de Arana in the unsuccessful adventure film Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992),[23] Zeta-Jones featured as a belly dancer in disguise in a 1992 episode of George Lucas' television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

[24] She next took on the part of an aspiring duchess in Splitting Heirs (1993), a farcical period drama from the director Robert Young about two children (Eric Idle and Rick Moranis) who are separated at birth.

In a mixed review, critic Lisa Nesselson of Variety found the miniseries to be "brightly colored" but "wooden and hollow", though thought that Zeta-Jones "imparts a certain grace and resolve to her sovereign-in-the-making".

[29] She next appeared as the pragmatic girlfriend of Sean Pertwee's character in Blue Juice (1995), publicised as Britain's first surf film, which the critic Leonard Maltin dismissed as a "superficial and predictable" production.

[32] Starring opposite Peter Gallagher and George C. Scott, she played the lead role of Isabella Paradine, a young mother who engages in an extramarital affair aboard the ill-fated RMS Titanic.

[37][38] Filming action and dance sequences while wearing heavy corsets in the dry Mexican desert proved challenging for Zeta-Jones, but she found the experience "worth suffering for".

[45][46] Later that year, Zeta-Jones appeared alongside Liam Neeson and Lili Taylor in The Haunting, a remake of the 1963 film of the same name about a team of paranormal experts who look into strange occurrences in an ill-fated mansion.

[54] Edward Guthman of the San Francisco Chronicle considered Zeta-Jones to be a standout among the cast and labelled her "sensational" in a scene in which Helena confronts a Tijuana dealer, adding that "through sheer conviction, she electrifies a moment that could have been absurd".

[60] William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer believed that Zeta-Jones had made "a wonderfully statuesque and bitchy saloon goddess", and David Edelstein of Slate wrote that she has "a smoldering confidence that takes your mind off her not-always-fluid dancing – although she's a perfectly fine hoofer, with majestic limbs and a commanding cleavage" and particularly praised her rendition of the song "All That Jazz".

[68] Writing for Empire, the critic Damon Wise labelled the film a "dazzling screwball comedy" and felt that Zeta-Jones had shown "an admirable facility for old-school quickfire patter".

[70] In 2004, Spielberg approached her to play an insecure air hostess in his comedy The Terminal, a film about a man (Tom Hanks) who is trapped at the JFK International Airport when he is denied entry into the United States.

Spielberg was intent on her playing against type as a strong-willed woman, with a vulnerability in her character,[12] but the critic A. O. Scott felt that it came across as using her for "her looks rather than for the arch, self-mocking wit that is her secret weapon as a comic actress".

[83][84] Claudia Puig of USA Today wrote that Zeta-Jones "shines as a character that finely balances off-putting reserve with sympathetic appeal", and Roger Ebert, despite disliking the film, did find her to be "convincing" in her role.

Set in Sweden during the early twentieth century, the musical follows the complicated relations between a group of people (including characters played by Zeta-Jones, Angela Lansbury and Alexander Hanson) during the course of a summer.

[97][98] In the ensemble musical comedy Rock of Ages, co-starring Tom Cruise and Bryan Cranston, Zeta-Jones played the part of a religiously conservative wife of a mayor.

The critic Todd McCarthy thought that Zeta-Jones "looks like class itself and nicely underplays", and Liam Lacey of The Globe and Mail observed that the actress "does a fair, if incongruous, impersonation of a forties vamp".

[108] Writing for The Hollywood Reporter, Justin Lowe stated that Zeta-Jones "nicely pulls off Russian spy Katja's mix of allure and menace", and with a worldwide gross of $148 million, Red 2 emerged as her most widely seen film since No Reservations.

[108] She found such a part opposite Bill Nighy and Toby Jones in the British war comedy film Dad's Army (2016), based on the television sitcom of the same name.

[111] Catherine Bray of Variety considered the film to be an "amiable but creaky resurrection" of the sitcom, and added that while Zeta-Jones "hits the required single note with some spirit" she was "generally underused" in it.

[129] Joshua Alston of Variety found Zeta-Jones to be the "best thing" about the show, adding that "her snarling villainy veers so close to camp that it sounds at times like she’s workshopping a comedic impression of her own voice".

[152] The journalist Sheila Johnston of The Daily Telegraph, in 2010, described Zeta-Jones as "the ultimate self-made success" who "constantly made bold decisions, and scrubbed up very nicely into a luscious star who radiates a classic […] brand of big-screen glamour.

[5] Her relationships in the early 1990s with television personality John Leslie, singer David Essex, and pop star Mick Hucknall were heavily publicised by the British press.

[167] In 2010, Douglas was diagnosed with tongue cancer and Zeta-Jones thus faced an emotionally turbulent time, saying: "When you get sideswiped like that [with the illness] it's an obvious trigger for your balance to be a little bit off – not sleeping, worry, stress.