GREAT ACTORS FROM WALES!

Christian Bale

Born on January 30, 1974, in Pembrokeshire, Wales. Starting his career as a child, Christian Bale has emerged as one of the most versatile actors in the entertainment industry. It seems that performing is in his genes with a mother who was a dancer and a clown and an older sister who was an actress. Even his grandfather was in the business, working as a stunt double for John Wayne on the 1962 film Hatari!

Bale landed his first commercial at the age of nine. Soon after, he was appearing on the London stage with comedian Rowan Atkinson in The Nerd. Steven Spielberg picked Bale out of 4,000 other young actors to play the part of Jim Graham in Empire of the Sun (1987). In the World War II drama, he played a young English boy growing up in China who ends up in a Japanese internment camp.

Bale's remarkable performance won him rave reviews as well as the Young Artist Award for Best Young Actor in a Motion Picture and the National Board of Review's award for Best Juvenile Performance. Only 13 years old at the time, Bale found all of the attention unnerving at times. He was known to excuse himself from an interview to go to the bathroom, and then he would simply leave the building.

More parts followed, including a small role in Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of William Shakespeare's Henry V (1989). A few years later, Bale found himself in the musical Newsies (1992). He had signed on to the project about young people who sold newspapers on the street—called newsboys— before the musical numbers were added. A box office dud, the project ended up becoming one of the lowest-grossing films ever made by Walt Disney Pictures.

In 1994, Bale had a supporting role in the film adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott classic Little Women, starring Winona Ryder as Jo March. He played Ryder's love interest, Theodore "Laurie" Laurence. Soon after this film, Bale tackled another famous literary character, Edward Rosier, in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1996), opposite Nicole Kidman.

Reunited with Kenneth Branagh for A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999), Bale had a more substantial role this time around. He played Demetrius, a young man in love with Hermia (Anna Friel) who does not return his affections and instead is in love with Lysander (Dominic West). In turn, Demetrius is loved by Helena (Calista Flockhart). All sorts of craziness ensue when the four venture into a forest inhabited by faeries.

Catherine Zeta-Jones was born on September 25, 1969, in Swansea, Wales. She began dancing when she was 4 years old. At age 15, she quit school to join a tour of The Pajama Game, and at 17, she had a major role in a London production of 42nd Street. In 1998, Zeta-Jones starred in The Mask of Zorro. More Hollywood films soon followed, including Entrapment (1999) with Sean Connery. The following year,

"As a little girl, I dreamed I would be in movies and musicals. I was devastated by the idea that I had been born in the wrong era of filmmaking."

Zeta-Jones appeared in the critically acclaimed Traffic, where she starred with Michael Douglas. She later won an Academy Award for her performance in Chicago (2002). In 2010, she received a Tony Award for her Broadway debut in A Little Night Music.

She began dance lessons at the age of 4. By the time she was 15, Zeta-Jones had dropped out of school to join a touring production of the musical The Pajama Game. She soon moved on to London's West End, where she appeared in a production of 42nd Street at the age of 17.

Making the move to television, Zeta-Jones found fame in her native Britain on the series The Darling Buds of May, which lasted from 1991 to 1993. After that series ended, the actress landed some high-profile TV movie roles, including as the title character in the 1996 historical biopic Catherine the Great.

Anthony Hopkins

Philip Anthony Hopkins was born on December 31, 1937, in Margam, Port Talbot, Wales. Hopkins is the son of Muriel Yeats -- a distant relative of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats -- and Richard Hopkins. His early years in Wales and schooling at Cowbridge Grammar School were relatively unremarkable, but when the soon-to-be actor met Richard Burton, the course of his life would dramatically change. Encouraged and inspired by Burton, Hopkins enrolled at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama when he was only 15 years old.

After graduation in 1957, Anthony Hopkins spent two years in the British Army before moving to London to begin training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. After training and working for several years, he became a kind of protégé of the legendary actor Sir Laurence Olivier. In 1965, Olivier invited Hopkins to join the Royal National Theatre and become his understudy. The famed actor wrote in his memoir, "A new young actor in the company of exceptional promise named Anthony Hopkins was understudying me and walked away with the part of Edgar like a cat with a mouse between its teeth." When Olivier came down with appendicitis during a production called Dance of Death, the young Hopkins stepped in, making waves with his performance.

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