Michael Douglas has a request he makes of Catherine Zeta Jones at home, and he says he never tires of it: a tap dance on the marble bathroom floor.
The 82-year-old told Heart Breakfast on Friday that his Swansea-born wife, a childhood tap champion, still obliges.
He said: “Sometimes I go and say, let’s go to the bathroom with the marble floor, and say, give me a little bit.”
He went on: “And I get a few tap…” before Jamie Theakston cut in: “You get her to dance for you in the bathroom?” “In the bathroom, yes.”
Douglas said Zeta Jones had been “the British tap-dancing champion when she was seven years old”. The 57-year-old grew up in Mumbles and learned her trade with Swansea Amateur Operatic Society before leaving for the West End as a teenager.
Amanda Holden asked whether his wife ever turns the Welsh accent on him “in a mood or a temper”. “She does,” he said.
“My wife was seven years old at the time”
Douglas was on the show to promote his memoir One Helluva Ride, published this month, in which he writes of the couple’s 2013 separation: “I never gave up hope that we would reconcile.”
The book also covers his romances with co-stars, among them Kathleen Turner on Romancing the Stone. “And my wife was seven years old at the time,” he said, to laughter in the studio.
He said the 25-year age gap meant “there was a life that you’ve had before I was married”, and that Zeta Jones “accepts and understands that”. He asked Turner’s permission before putting their story in print, and said they had been friends ever since.
Holden pressed him on Glenn Close, his Fatal Attraction co-star. “We had a wonderful working relationship,” he said, “but that was a great time.”
His advice to young actors was not to take an on-screen romance off camera. “The problem is you may break up, and then you’re looking at each other and you hate each other’s guts.”
The original nepo baby
Douglas called himself a “nepo baby”, the label Zeta Jones called “horrific” last month when it was pinned on their children Dylan and Carys.
He and his father Kirk made “about 130 films” between them across eight decades, he said. Kirk’s one line on his son’s success: “Michael, if I knew how successful you were going to be, I would’ve been nicer.”
Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh were round the family table when he was growing up. “You just saw them as real people with their real insecurities,” he said.
Zeta Jones has her own history with the programme. In September she told the same hosts she had turned down Ryan Reynolds “many times” over Welcome to Wrexham because “Swansea City is my team”.
She is on screen now as Jackie Price in Kill Jackie, the Prime Video thriller partly filmed in Swansea, the first lead role in which she uses her own accent.
The tap shoes, it seems, never went back in the box. Douglas knows the city too, having sat in the Brangwyn Hall in 2019 to watch Zeta Jones receive the Freedom of Swansea.
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