Entertainment

Catherine Zeta-Jones to play Morticia in Netflix’s Wednesday Addams series

It will be directed by Tim Burton.
It will be directed by Tim Burton.

Catherine Zeta-Jones will play Morticia in Tim Burton’s live-action Wednesday Addams series, Netflix has said.

The Oscar-winning Welsh actress, 51, will play the family matriarch alongside US actor Luis Guzman as Gomez Addams.

Jenna Ortega will play the lead role in the series, which is titled Wednesday.

Based on the character originally created by cartoonist Charles Addams, Wednesday is described as a “coming-of-age comedy” set during the death-obsessed youngster’s school years.

Acclaimed filmmaker Burton – known for his affinity with the bizarre and macabre – will direct the series.

Wednesday was first introduced – though without a name – in Addams’s original 1938 cartoons for the New Yorker.

She and the rest of her family, including Gomez and Morticia, were given names for the classic 1964 TV series.

Carolyn Jones played Morticia on the small screen while Anjelica Huston starred in the 1991 film The Addams Family and its sequel two years later, Addams Family Values.

Zeta-Jones, who has been married to Hollywood star Michael Douglas, 76, since 2000, got her big break in the early 1990s in TV series The Darling Buds Of May.

She won the best supporting actress Oscar for 2002 musical Chicago.