Catherine Zeta-Jones: no fairy-tale ending She met the man over there at the Deauville Film Festival in 1998. When the first whiff of romance emerged, it was unkindly suggested that Catherine had been stalking the marquees for a big-name catch, but everything else suggests Douglas made the running. He was in a career trough, his looks were shot, and having been dumped by his wife Diandra, was humiliatingly tracked down to a sex-addiction clinic in Arizona. He perhaps recognised a key moment in a man's life when the future starts to look less fun than the past, and into the lonesome void, coal-eyed and devastatingly upholstered, tottered a woman hailed as "the Celtic Sophia Loren." Catherine Jones - she added the Zeta later - had grown up in Mumbles, a seaside suburb of Swansea, where her father, David, worked as a cake maker. At 10, she was dancing in the finals of a Welsh Butlins Star Trail junior talent competition, and at 13 on the West End stage in Bugsy Malone. To an already impressive repertoire she soon added curves, and cascades of raven hair, and in 1990 had her first taste of stardom as the mouth-watering Mariette Larkin in ITV's The Darling Buds of May. It would have been easy to have carried on in the semi-stardom of British light entertainment, but she wanted more and figured she might find it in Hollywood. The years that followed mostly consisted of not-quite-breakthrough parts in TV dramas. That all changed when Steven Spielberg cast her opposite Antonio Banderas in The Mask of Zorro. The film was a big hit. "The most spectacular newcomer is Catherine Zeta-Jones," wrote the influential New York critic Rex Reed, "whose dark eyes, porcelain skin and meltingly radiant smile reminded me of Natalie Wood." It was on the back of Zorro's success that she arrived in Deauville. How many ways could Douglas show his love? Well, he agreed to consider South Wales as a wedding venue, but backed off after apparently having to spend hundreds of pounds upgrading the couple's Swansea hotel suite. Eventually, they opted for a £1.5 million ceremony at the Plaza hotel in New York, with a Welsh choir and a 10-tier cake. They already had a baby son, Dylan, and three years later, when along came a daughter, Carys, it seemed the fairy tale was complete. "I will never get divorced," Catherine once said. Divorce repulses me. I grew up in a small, strictly Catholic fishing village, where people have a different attitude to those in Hollywood. They might yet surprise us, these two old stagers, and we should surely wish them well with their evaluations. It can't be entirely hopeless. Later this month, Michael will be back at the Deauville festival. Fifteen years older, alone again, and facing another of those key moments.