Cameron Diaz is happy to admit she’s an accidental actress. Fifteen years ago, as a 21-year-old model with no acting experience, she auditioned for her first movie, The Mask, pretty much on a lark. Cut to Hollywood, 2009. Cameron Diaz is the top-earning actress in the world, regularly banking $15m a movie. According to Forbes magazine, she made more than $50m last year. That’s a hell of an accident.

You don’t, however, remain one of Hollywood’s biggest stars for more than a decade by accident. Diaz has done fabulously well in films as diverse as The Sweetest Thing, Charlie’s Angels, Being John Malkovich and Shrek, where she is the voice of Fiona, by trading on her innate winning appeal. As the 36-year-old actress settles into a chair just a few feet away from me in the skinniest blue jeans and a loose, half-sleeved blue silk top, thin gold hoops dangling from her ears, sipping from a huge coffee Thermos, nibbling at sliced avocado and rice crackers, I feel like I’m inhaling purified essence of Diaz. It’s making me dizzy.

She’s beautiful without being too pretty: her huge blue eyes are set into a face that’s almost too wide, above a smile that’s almost too cavernous, the whole engaging kit and caboodle offset by a nose that’s been battered and bent like an East End pugilist’s. Sure, she’s a babe, and she looks effortlessly fabulous in anything from a rubber wetsuit, when she’s surfing, to a strapless John Galliano Dior dress, when she’s presenting an Oscar. But Cameron Diaz is, above all, a great broad. She can beat you at pool, down tequila shots, burp, swear worse than Jonathan Ross, laugh uproariously at your bad jokes and, for good mea­sure, openly acknowledge that “Sex is the best!”. Which has endeared her to a never-ending posse of famous and equally good-looking boyfriends, including Matt Dillon, Justin Timberlake, whom she dated for four years, John Mayer, the surfer Kelly Slater and, most recently, the British model Paul Sculfor, from whom she has reportedly now split. Oh, and she’s a tireless fighter for the environment. What’s not to love?

A few years ago, not long after she’d starred in There’s Something About Mary — the quintessential Cameron Diaz role — The New York Times dissected her appeal with rather more historical, cinematographic precision. “Ms Diaz is a great American type, a game, outdoorsy girl in the tradition of Carole Lombard, Jean Arthur, Jane Russell and Angie Dickinson.” The writer noted that all these actresses had been discovered by the director Howard Hawks. “Ms Diaz would have fit marvellously into the tradition of Hawksian woman, with her sense of fun, camaraderie and forthright sexuality.” Not that any of Hawks’s actresses were required to sport the unorthodox gel that adorned Diaz’s hair in There’s Something About Mary.

From:entertainment.timesonline.co.uk