To make it more familiar to me, I ended up treating my swordplay scenes like choreography. So it was, 'One and two and three and four and five, and turn and step and down and up and lunge.'

Her breakthrough role was in the 2000 film Traffic for which Catherine Zeta-Jones earned her first Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture. In August 2011 it was reported that Zeta Jones was trying to quit smoking by using electronic cigarettes. In the media
Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders parodied Zeta-Jones as a vacuous über-celebrity named "Catherine Spartacus-Zeta-Douglas-Jones" (variously described as a princess of the Spartacus dynasty or the Queen of Wales) in 2007 on their British sketch comedy television show French & Saunders (1987–2010) in the series Back with a Vengeance.

In 2010 Zeta-Jones won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical for her portrayal of Desiree in A Little Night Music. Later Catherine Zeta-Jones appeared in the 2003 romantic comedy film Intolerable Cruelty and 2004 crime comedy film Ocean's Twelve. Zeta-Jones starred in the 2005 sequel of the 1998 film The Legend of Zorro.