Cameron Diaz interview
Often portrayed
as the kooky yet endearing blonde sidekick in films, Gabrielle
Donnelly finds Cameron Diaz has much more to offer than just a
pretty face.
When Cameron Diaz was a little girl, she had a toy castle,
complete with king and queen, prince, princess, and lots of knights
on horseback. "And my sister and I never once played with the
queen or the princess!" she remembers today, when we meet in
Los Angeles. "We threw them to the side, locked them away in a
tower, and played with the knights and the prince and the king
instead. I was never the princess type of girl. I've always
looked at life in the way that you can't just sit around
waiting for things to happen to you - you've got to go out into
the world and find your experiences. So I wanted to be like the
knights on horseback!"
Cameron Diaz has never been your standard Hollywood blonde.
She's one on her own, right down to her first name, which she
now admits caused some concern with her first agent when she
started working as a model. "When I had my first business card
made up, my agent asked me, 'What name do you want to put on
it?' This sounded like a trick question. I said, 'What name
do you think I want? Cameron Diaz of course!' My father made my
name up - he had a thing for making up names. My sister is called
Chimene and, if I was a boy, I would've been Manahem Eugenio,
so I feel I've been really fortunate in being a girl!"
Born 37 years ago this August in San Diego, California, the
daughter of Billie Early Diaz, a German-English-American
businesswoman, and Emilio Diaz, a second generation Cuban American
oil foreman (who, very sadly, died last year at the age of just
58), Cameron says she and Chimene were given the happiest and most
laid back childhood anyone can imagine.
"I was really lucky with my parents. My Mom is a very strong
and independent woman, who worked a full-time job, came home and
made dinner for us all every evening, so she was a great role model
for me in that sense. Both my parents were never uptight, they
didn't get freaked out if things weren't going right, and
there was never a sense of, 'You have to do this, and if it
doesn't work out, it's over!' It was more a feeling of,
'Let's try it out... and if it doesn't work, well,
let's move on and find a way it will work.' It's always
been that way in my family, and as a result I think I've become
a person who tends to go with the flow when things go bad - and if
you do that, you find they get better!"
Blessed with an enviable figure, fair hair and blue eyes from her
mother's side of the family - "Although I do have my
Dad's nose and chin," she notes helpfully - it seemed only
natural to Cameron to try her hand at modelling when she left high
school. Over the course of the next five years, she travelled the
world, modelled for Calvin Klein and Levis jeans, and had her face
on the cover of several glossy magazines. When she was 21, she
auditioned - mostly, she says, for a lark - for the role of Tina
Carlyle, the beautiful blonde who wins Jim Carrey's heart in
the 1994 comedy The Mask.
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