Jones (Zeta was her middle name; she added the hyphen later) was the daughter of Irish and Welsh parents. She performed with her church's amateur theatre group as a child and soon secured the starring role in the troupe's production of Annie. When she was 13 years old, she won first prize in a national tap-dancing competition. At age 15 she quit school and moved to London to pursue a career in acting. Her first major onstage role came two years later in a West End revival of the musical 42nd Street when both the lead and the first understudy for the role were unable to perform; the producer of the musical then made her the lead for the remainder of the production run. It was not until she landed the role of Mariette Larkin in the popular British television comedy-drama series The Darling Buds of May during the early 1990s, however, that Zeta-Jones became well known in England. Her popularity made her a frequent target of the media; after a particularly harrowing incident in which she drove her car into a lamppost while trying to elude the paparazzi, Zeta-Jones moved to the United States.

Zeta-Jones relocated to Los Angeles but initially found it difficult to gain a foothold in Hollywood films. She starred instead in made-for-television movies. Her performance in one such project, the miniseries Titanic, caught the eye of director Steven Spielberg (Spielberg, Steven), who thought she would be suitable for a leading role in his then-upcoming production of The Mask of Zorro (1998). After this breakthrough, Zeta-Jones went on to star opposite Sean Connery (Connery, Sir Sean) in the thriller Entrapment (1999) and to portray the wife of a drug dealer in Steven Soderbergh's Oscar-winning drama Traffic (2000). Zeta-Jones appeared in the romantic comedy High Fidelity in 2000, the same year she married actor Michael Douglas (Douglas, Michael).

In 2002 Zeta-Jones starred as the homicidal entertainer Velma Kelly in the film adaptation of the popular Broadway musical Chicago. Her singing and dancing skills impressed critics and audiences and helped her win an Oscar. She subsequently appeared in several comedies, including Intolerable Cruelty (2003), in which she played a cunning gold digger opposite George Clooney (Clooney, George), and The Terminal (2004), a film directed by Spielberg and featuring Tom Hanks (Hanks, Tom). In 2004 she starred with Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Matt Damon in Ocean's Twelve, a sequel to the blockbuster Ocean's Eleven (2001). Her later films include The Legend of Zorro (2005) and No Reservations (2007).