Catherine Zeta Jones stars in romantic comedy The Rebound

“I’ve been looking for a comedy for a while, I love comedy. Not that I can tell a joke beginning to end, but if the writing is on the page I always enjoy that,” says the Welsh-born actress, who turned 40 last September.

Her “more than usually sexed-up and foul-mouthed” role as Sandy sends her from the well-off suburbs to New York City where the newly single mum falls for a much younger man, Aram, played by Justin Bartha, with both of them on the rebound from failed relationships in Bart Freundlich’s frothy and frank comedy.

“Bart sent me the script and I just thought, ‘Wow, I’ve never played this kind of character before’,” says Catherine.

“It has all the elements that I was looking for, a zany comedy feel to it and a bittersweet story that Sandy goes through, and then for her to find this love when she least expected it... it was the full package.”

Catherine’s career is on a high after she won the Tony Award this year for best leading actress in a musical for her Broadway turn in A Little Night Music. Now the focus switches back to the movie world, where she has enjoyed such hits as Traffic, The Mask Of Zorro and Chicago, having initially bloomed on the British small screen as Mariette Larkin in The Darling Buds Of May.

By way of contrast to her own settled home life, married to Hollywood veteran Michael Douglas with two children, in The Rebound she is playing a character on the cusp of a sudden major change.

“At the beginning of the film, Sandy is living the quintessential soccer-mum life in Connecticut. Her life just seems perfect: she has two beautiful children, a husband, not exactly a white picket fence but everything is great. And then she sees her neighbour giving her husband a sexual act during her son’s birthday party – as you can imagine, life changes quite dramatically. She picks up her children and heads to New York for a new start,” says Catherine.

The first person Sandy meets when apartment-hunting in New York is café barman Aram. “She finds an apartment for rent above a coffee shop and Aram’s sidekick suggests that Aram could be a nanny, which is a little strange to her,” says Catherine.

“We both got seriously dumped in different ways and so we form a relationship, firstly by him babysitting while I go through this horrific dating process. He helps me out and we find, even though he is much younger than me, that we have a lot in common.”

Unlike Catherine’s blockbuster roles, the film was made on a short schedule. “It was like doing a theatre piece in a way,” she says. “We all came in, we all needed to know our lines, it was like, ‘Great, great, run over to the other side of the street, let’s do it again’.

“There was just a great energy to the whole piece.”

Catherine enjoyed filming in New York.

“These days so many films are set in New York... but sometimes they take you to another city because it’s cheaper and say, ‘Toronto can look like New York any day of the week’, but the fact is, it can’t,” she says. “You don’t get the essence of the city and the energy and so it was great working in the city.”

So, Catherine, what will audiences take away from The Rebound?

“What’s enduring and what’s universal to the piece is that divorce and break-up of relationships don’t just happen to women – and the emotions that come out of that don’t just happen to women. It happens to men too.

“The movie also shows the comedy in certain situations – at some point you just got to laugh and go, ‘God’. Yes it’s bittersweet, but it’s so great when you see these people finding love again, second time round.”