Court claims a far cry from Zeta Jones' roots

Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas may have won their High Court battle against Hello! magazine over the unauthorised publication of their wedding pictures – but the case was not a PR success for Hollywood’s golden couple.

Until then, Zeta Jones was feted as the girl from humble Welsh beginnings who made it to the top of the Hollywood A-list.

But her appearance at the High Court left that image in tatters.

She claimed to have felt “violated” by the secret snaps of her wedding, which she said made her an object of derision.

The 33-year-old said she was upset by one picture of Douglas feeding her a piece of wedding cake “because I did not want my husband shoving a spoon down my throat to be photographed ... it looks like all I did was eat”.

Another picture caused her distress because it made her look “large” in her Christian Lacroix wedding dress.

But the remark that really demonstrated how different she was to the Zeta Jones of old was when she dismissed the couple’s £1m (€1.5m) pay cheque from Hello! rival OK! magazine as “not that much” to people like them.

It was all a far cry from Zeta Jones’s humble beginnings in Mumbles, Swansea, where she was born the daughter of a sweet factory worker.

She first found fame in the TV series The Darling Buds Of May and enjoyed high profile relationships with John Leslie and actor Angus MacFadyen, to whom she was briefly engaged.

After leaving the show there followed a period in the wilderness when she appeared in a string of flop films and launched an ill-fated pop career.

But her career turned around when Steven Spielberg spotted her in a TV movie and cast her opposite Antonio Banderas in The Mask of Zorro.

It was soon after her appearance in the swashbuckling hit that she met Douglas at the Deauville Film Festival in 1998.

They began dating the following March and the relationship raised eyebrows because of the couple’s 25-year age gap.

On New Year’s Eve 1999 Douglas proposed at his home in the US ski resort of Aspen, and the following month it was announced that Zeta Jones was expecting their first child.

Baby Dylan was born in August 2000 and the couple married three months later.

The relationship hit the headlines in the weeks before the wedding when it was reported that they had reached a pre-nuptial agreement to prevent Zeta Jones from walking away with half of Douglas’s £150m (€219m) fortune in the event of a divorce.

She will reportedly receive £1m (€1.5m) for every year of their marriage if they split.

Basic Instinct star Douglas was understandably wary after being forced to pay ex-wife Diandra a reported £40m (€58m) when their marriage ended after 22 years.

Zeta Jones and Douglas now live a life of luxury, dividing their time between homes in Bermuda, Manhattan, Los Angeles, Majorca and Aspen.

The couple’s second child is due any day.

Regarded as one of the most solid marriages in Hollywood, the couple are gushing in their praise of one another – with Douglas taking out an ad in Variety magazine to tell her how much he loved her after her success in film musical Chicago.

Her all-singing, all-dancing role as Velma Kelly was regarded by many as the best performance of her career so far.

Some movie industry insiders believed that the fall-out from the High Court case might have dented her Oscar chances.

But within weeks of appearing in court, she scooped the Academy Award for best supporting actress, to go with the Bafta she won for the same film.

The court case may have altered her image in Britain, but displaying her diva credentials has done her career no harm at all.