Zeta-Jones does kitchen work for tips

Catherine Zeta Jones

Hollywood's history is littered with tales of actors going to painstaking lengths to experience the inner lives of their latest movie characters.

Marlon Brando and James Dean were champions of the method, and Robert De Niro became legendary for physical transformations undertaken for film roles.

Now actress Catherine Zeta-Jones has joined the ranks of Konstantin Stanislavski's school of method actors by spending a week "undercover" in a New York restaurant, in order to understand her upcoming film role as a chef.

Such was her zeal and application, Zeta-Jones was judged "a great garnisher" by the Italian restaurateur at Manhattan's Fiamma, where she worked in the kitchens and brought out meals for the odd unsuspecting diner.

The eye-opening stunt was arranged to provide invaluable insights for her forthcoming role as a chef in the romantic comedy Mostly Martha.

The Welsh-born actress worked mainly as a chef in a Michelin-starred restaurant, which is in the heart of Manhattan's trendy SoHo district.

In an interview with People Magazine, Fiamma's co-owner and chef, Michael White, said: "She's been doing a lot in the kitchen, sauteing and cutting. She's a great garnisher. Drizzling oil and balsamic on plates - she does a nice job."

She even waitressed for a night without the guests realising that a Hollywood actress was serving their meal.

A fellow waitress recounted Zeta-Jones' foray onto the "shop floor" and how she went largely unrecognised by guests, although she was remarkably composed when some became suspicious.

"One night she did a little serving. A few people said to her, 'You look so much like Catherine Zeta-Jones'. And she said, 'Oh, I get that all the time'," she said.

Mostly Martha, which is based on a 2001 German film, is due to be released next year. Zeta-Jones plays a chef whose life is changed when she has to care for her niece, played by Leah Ward.

Co-star Aaron Eckhart plays the sous-chef who helps her find that there's more to life than work.

Zeta-Jones has not been known to study her characters using method acting, but she has won acclaim for past performances, including her Oscar success in 2003 for her supporting role in the film musical Chicago.

But her stint in the restaurant might prove invaluable to Zeta-Jones' acting abilities, not least because she plays an accomplished chef while being a self-confessed "bad cook" in real life.

She has said of her culinary abilities: "I am a terrible cook, and my husband won't allow me to go in the kitchen any more."

She is not the first among present-day Hollywood actors to undertake "real life" experiences in order to enrich a film role.

Many more actresses now are prepared to breach the Hollywood taboo of becoming fat by piling on the pounds for film roles. They include Renee Zellweger in the Bridget Jones film series, and Charlize Theron in Monster, in which she shaved off her eyebrows and gained weight to play Aileen Wuornos, a serial killer on death row.


Stars who did it the hard way

Robert De Niro
* When he was hired for Taxi Driver, De Niro worked 12-hour days for a month driving cabs in preparation for this role. He also set a record after gaining an unprecedented 27kg to play boxer Jake La Motta in Raging Bull.

Adrien Brody
* He isolated himself, learned to play Chopin's Ballade Number One and lost 13kg in six weeks to play a Jewish musician who goes into hiding in Nazi Germany in Roman Polanski's film, The Pianist.

Reese Witherspoon
* To perfect her Oscar-winning role as June Carter, the country singer who falls in love with Johnny Cash, in Walk the Line, Witherspoon spent several months of intensive work with famed music producer T Bone Burnett, learned to sing and play the notoriously difficult autoharp.

Uma Thurman
* Thurman undertook a punishing regime in which she became proficient at kung fu and mastered how to use a samurai sword for Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill films, in which she plays a martial arts expert and assassin.

Daniel Day-Lewis
* The stories of his method are legion - he spent six months in the wild to become Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans, was locked in a jail and interrogated for In the Name of  the Father, about wrongful imprisonment after the Guildford bombing, and he worked with butchers for his role in Scorsese's Gangs of New York.

- INDEPENDENT