Continued from page 2

Red Hot Mama

Thursday January 09, 2003 12:00 PM EST

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Zeta-Jones has never been a slacker. "My earliest memories are of her tap-dancing in the kitchen," says her brother David. "It used to drive us crazy, but you couldn't stop her." Born in working-class Swansea, Wales, to father Dai, 56, a retired candy-company salesman, and mother Pat, 58, a homemaker, Catherine Jones (she created her stage monicker by annexing her paternal grandmother's first name) gravitated to showbiz from the get-go. By 4 she was studying tap; a few years later she won a local talent contest with a medley of songs from -- but of course -- Chicago. She made her West End debut at 11 starring in Annie. When a star of 42nd Street was injured, Zeta-Jones was promoted from the chorus line -- and soon leapt to TV fame as a sexy farm girl in the 1991-93 British series The Darling Buds of May.

Zeta-Jones became a tabloid favorite, with a string of boyfriends including director Nick Hamm, 44, and actors John Leslie, 37, and Angus MacFadyen, 39, who broke off their 15-month engagement in 1996. With her career stalling after Buds' finale -- a series of pop singles she recorded failed to catch on -- Zeta-Jones decided to try her luck in the U.S. Her sultry turn in 1998's The Mask of Zorro left Hollywood smitten. That same year Danny DeVito introduced his pal Douglas to Zeta-Jones, who was freshly split from Simply Red singer Mick Hucknall. "I knew this was something special," she says, but with work keeping them apart, "we never even kissed until nine months later." Douglas proposed on New Year's Eve 1999 in Aspen. The 25-year age gap? "It's nothing," Zeta-Jones says. "He never ever makes me feel inferior or says something like, 'You were just being born when I was learning this.' " And he's willing to share power. At night "he lets me hold the TV remote until he starts to get tired, then he gives me carte blanche to turn everything off."

Zeta-Jones gave birth to Dylan -- inheriting his father and grandfather's famous chin, "this little thing came out with a big old dimple, which made me laugh," she says -- three months before their November 2000 wedding, which filled Manhattan's Plaza Hotel with 20,000 roses, a 40-person Welsh choir and celebrity A-listers. "On the outside it looked like a huge Hollywood wedding," Zeta-Jones says. "But it was so personal and intimate. Between Kirk's family, Diana's family and my Welsh family, it was 175 family members."

And counting. Fortunately for her, her husband is ready to focus on home life. He wasn't always that way. "My priorities are my marriage and my children, whereas earlier my priority was my career," says Douglas. Mr. Mom? Sounds good to Zeta-Jones. "I know when I come home," she says, "there's something special waiting for me."

-- SAMANTHA MILLER
-- TODD GOLD and RACHEL BIERMANN in Los Angeles, SHARON COTLIAR and LIZA HAMM in New York City and ROSEMARY JONES in Bermuda

PEOPLE.com Photo Gallery: Catherine Zeta-Jones: Rise of a Superstar