"It was like Mexican boot camp,"

"Two hours of dancing, two hours of horseback riding, two hours of sword fighting and two hours of dialect classes--daily."

In the film, Sir Anthony Hopkins plays the original legendary masked crusader, who emerges from two decades of false imprisonment in need of a successor, whom he finds in a bandit with a troubled past (Antonio Banderas). Zeta-Jones plays Hopkins's daughter and Banderas's love interest.

"Elena isn't a damsel in distress," says the 28-year-old actress. "There was great physicality in the role. Elena is a strong woman, but vulnerable."

Zeta-Jones will also play a strong-yet-vulnerable, fast-talking master thief opposite Sean Connery in next year's romantic thriller Entrapment.

The British spitfire comes to these roles with plenty of experience. A star of the London stage (at the tender age of 10, she played a lead in a theatrical production of Bugsy Malone), Zeta-Jones moved to the capital city from her native South Wales when she turned 15. The next year, she was cast as the second understudy for the lead role in the musical 42nd Street, which entailed a grueling schedule.

"I didn't know anybody," she says shrugging. "I trained in the morning, then went to the theater and did the show, went to bed and got up and did it again."

Her diligence paid off when both the star and first understudy were absent the night the play's producer, David Merrick, was in the audience.

"After that," Zeta-Jones recalls, "I was playing the lead, eight shows a week."

She worked steadily in the theater before starring in the hit British comedy-drama TV series The Darling Buds of May. Her small-screen success was a mixed blessing, however.

"Within one hour of being on television, my whole life changed. People recognized me all over the country," Zeta-Jones explains. "But I wasn't ready for the British press, where they'd print things completely out of context and make me feel like a bimbo," she says, shaking her head incredulously.

Although she tried to ignore the gossip in the press by plowing into more work--Kurt Weill's Street Scenes with the English National Opera and the title role in the TV miniseries Catherine the Great--the pressure forced her to look overseas for work. In America, Zeta-Jones landed roles in the film The Phantom and TV movies Splitting Heirs and Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, but it was her part in the TV miniseries Titanic that caught Zorro executive producer Steven Spielberg's eye.

"Within a week [of Spielberg seeing me], I had the part," she grins. "After all the times that were quite hard when I first came here, I thought, 'Right. Now I understand: This is why I came here.' "

(c) Live! Magazine, 1998

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