The Catherine Zeta Jones age shaming saga

She is 57 and gets a lot of publicity that she has aged poorly for awhile now

In November 2025, Catherine Zeta-Jones attended a Netflix event in Los Angeles to promote the new season of Wednesday, where she plays Morticia Addams.

A short interview clip from the event racked up over 2.5 million views, but many of the hundreds of comments quickly turned to her age and looks.

Commenters questioned whether she was really only 56 and said she hadn’t aged well.

Here is article about it: https://humenglish.com/latest/women-rally-behind-catherine-zeta-jones-after-age-shaming-backlash/

Then came the backlash to the backlash.

Women rallied behind her, with former Miss Great Britain Classic winner Laura White calling the criticism nonsense and pointing out that men like Tom Cruise or George Clooney don’t face the same sell-by date.

Beauty journalist Sali Hughes argued that women are trapped either way: age naturally and people say you should do more, get work done and you’re accused of not aging gracefully.

I do agree that mocking someone’s face is completely inappropriate.

But I think they’re all missing the main point… Why does someone who once had one of the best biomechanically developed faces in Hollywood look so different at 57?

Who she was

Catherine Zeta-Jones came out of Swansea, Wales, and built a career on stage and television before Hollywood noticed.

Then came The Mask of Zorro in 1998, Entrapment in 1999, and Traffic in 2000.

In 2002 she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Chicago, a role that showed off her singing and dancing as much as her screen presence.

Her marriage to Michael Douglas kept her in the public eye, and a later run in Ocean’s Twelve, Rock of Ages, and Netflix’s Wednesday has kept her popular for decades.

Great structure when she was young

In her late 20s and 30s, Catherine had terrific biomechanics.

Wide-set eyes, high and full cheekbones, a strong, symmetrical jawline, and a broad smile.

I know the look quite well because when I first met my wife in Ukraine in 2010 I thought she looked quite a bit like Zeta Jones (and she used to get that a fair bit at the time).

It was the type of structure that you rarely saw come out of developed countries like America and the UK. And more often saw in places like Eastern Europe.

I would put her in the same category as the Ryan Reynolds and Tom Hardy cases I’ve written about. Elite structure early on, which is what makes the later change so noticeable.

How does she look now?

At 57 her face has changed in a way that goes beyond normal aging in my view.

It’s not that she doesn’t look fine for 57. She does.

It’s that she doesn’t look fine for someone that was in the top 0.1% biomechanically 30 years earlier.

The asymmetry is more visible, with one side of the face seeming to sit differently from the other. The fullness through the midface has thinned. The lines of the jaw don’t look as balanced as they used to.

And she lost the killer ‘cat-like’ eyes a long time ago already.

So what caused it?

Did she do dental work?

The dental question

Catherine Zeta Jones almost definitely did dental work.

And the celebrity dentist, Dr. Larry Rosenthal, was likely one of the ones that was responsible.

Most likely it happened around the early 2000’s because that is when her teeth seem to have changed in photos.

Here in the Wall Street Journal you can see that she’s named as one of the celebrity patients of Dr. Rosenthal along with Mr. Donald Trump :)

Plus I browsed Google images looking for images first from 1998 where she seems naturally thin.

And I compared to 2004 where her structure seems to have already gotten wider and less defined.

Which to me is a very good signal that this person tampered with their biomechanics in a negative way.

What did she do exactly?

Well at least one source mentioned that Rosenthal had given her a “full set of Hollywood veneers.”

And that would have been all it takes to flatten the curve of spee over time and send her structure spiralling downwards.

The Curve of Spee

Her career went south with her biomechanics

We’ve barely heard of Catherine Zeta Jones in the past decade.

She has done some things, but nothing big and not a lot. As you can see from the list above.

It seems like she has been taking herself out of the limelight unlike many actors that are older than her like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and George Clooney (all in their 60s).

Or even Stallone who was very active in Hollywood all throughout his 70’s (now he is 80).

Honestly, I think in the late 90’s she had better structure than all of them. And now I think she has declined faster than all of them.

Also note that this is not an attack on gender as I think there are plenty of female actresses that have held their biomechanics well and are pretty active in Hollywood (eg. Demi Moore, Jodie Foster, etc.) despite being in their 60’s and above.

Rather this is simply a biomechanical point of view on what I think happened to her.

Closing thoughts

I feel particularly bad for Catherine Zeta Jones as I think she is the type of person that wanted to remain very authentic and natural.

In 2016 she stated publicly that she’d never done plastic surgery despite the fact that there would have been strong pressure on her to do it.

Because she would have been collapsing for over a decade already at that point and it was probably having a pretty negative impact on her career.

But she didn’t do it.

In a way she gave up the stardom and decided to play it low key.

She also seems to have focused on her family during that time (they have two kids that are now in their 20’s).

In a way she did what I did around the same time after a dentist filed my teeth down in mid-2014. I put my life in a lower gear, focused on family, and adjusted my values to my new reality.

But now… i’m making up for lost time.

And I hope Catherine Zeta Jones will have that same opportunity too one day.