Rarely out of the public eye, Cameron Diaz tells Phil Penfold how she handles fame and fortune.

Cameron Diaz reflects that her parents, who have been married for 34 years, gave their daughter her down-to-earth attitude about life and she thanks them “so much” for being “so inspiring to me”.

“Their commitment is so strong,” she says proudly. “I’ve always said I’ve wanted something similar for myself.” Whether — or not — she has told her partner popstar Justin Timberlake this is something that is not up for discussion. Her private life, she defends, is ‘off limits’. So no discussion on her broken engagement to Jared Leto then, or her many years spent in the company of Matt Dillon? “No.”

She says — very politely, and without a hint of any sort of menace — “I just will not go into that and discuss it. Everyone has to understand that, surely? I mean, it’s hard enough to keep something like that together and working without my spilling little bits of information all over the place? Justin and I have to keep it all back for ourselves, private stuff, or else we’d both go insane!”

She loves the way that her mother and father have talked to her and her older sister Chimene over the years, “imparting their wisdom from their experience. Older people can do that. They’ve taken things in over the years, whereas youngsters today seem to learn things through the Internet, or a TV box. It’s not the same. Mom and Dad understand the world, kids today don’t. They’d do well to listen to their parents or grandparents, but sadly, when there are so many families where there’s only one parent or no sign of a grandparent in the frame . . . it just gets harder and harder, and it’s not going to get any easier!

“It’s always a breath of fresh air for me to talk to people who are older than I am — especially in this society which seems to me to be obsessed with youth,” says 33-year-old Cameron. “Those people have a knowledge, which I find awesomely impressive. When I retire (if I retire), I want to go to one of those communities of livewire senior citizens where they just have a ball all the time and rejoice in their lives. I really do!” 

Even so she has been known to give her dad advice, once famously telling him, after he’d confided a few personal facts to an enquiring reporter that, “Journalists, no matter how many cigars they smoke with you, are not your friends, so don’t talk to them!”

OK, so Cameron and Justin (who is nine years younger than Cameron) are one of the world’s most sought after celebrity couples. Does she have a take on that? She sighs, and says that she most certainly does. “I cannot help, Justin cannot help, who we fall in love with — no one can. The pressures are extraordinary when the public see you as being ‘famous’. There are so many magazines out there — I call them ‘rag mags’ — that their interest in people’s lives has become, like, extreme. When I go anywhere and the paparazzi find out about it, it’s like a campaign battle. There are two dozen guys following me, all with cameras, and when I’m doing the simplest things, like getting out of my car, they’re all shouting at me — right in my face.

“Sometimes the things they yell are horrible. And that is all because they’re hoping that I’ll react and scream back, and — bingo — they’ve got the shot that they want. So I have to take a deep breath and control it — all the time. Wow, what a waste of energy it all is. Constantly. And it’s very hard to deal with, you know that?”

Mind you, Ms Diaz is up there with Julia Roberts at the moment, and able to easily command a cool 20 million dollars a film. Which is not bad money, by any standards. It turns out that she is something of a compulsive shopper and if the paparazzi want to catch her at any strategic place, it will be outside highly exclusive shoe stores in Los Angeles, in New York, or in London. 

“I really do not know how many pairs I own,” she confesses, “but it runs into many, many dozens . . . maybe hundreds? The thing is, when I get them back to my closets, I can’t stand them in their boxes, the boxes really turn me off. So I have them all neatly stacked on racks inside the wardrobes. All in order. It drives Justin crazy, but there we are!”

Then she laughs and admits, “But on the other hand I do know a lot of women who just throw their shoes all over the place, in apartments that are just the epitome of chaos. At least I know where things are, and that’s a step in the right direction, isn’t it? No hideous pun intended!” When she goes to London, she laughs, “I wear these (she shows a calf-length pair of big faux fur boots) because I never know how cold it is going to be. Not for a premiere, obviously, but if I’m going shopping, they are far more practical. To me, unless I’m doing something that pushes me into the public eye, comfort is all I crave!”

She recently took on a worldwide adventure for MTV, a 10-episode series called Trippin’, in which she explored a cause very dear to her heart — looking at some of the most environmentally challenged places on this planet, and how they might be preserved. She went to, among other locations, the jungles of South America, and across the Himalayas.

A furious Cameron later sued two major media outlets for saying that the producer of the series, Shane Nickerson, and she were having an affair, something that she describes as a totally false allegation. “Normally,” she says calmly, “you just have to avoid or ignore those stories, otherwise you would forever be running around doing damage limitation. But that one was very specific — and very wrong. It just goes on and on. One magazine says that Justin and I are breaking up, the next says that we are getting married in secret, and then another says that his mother hates me or that we are fighting over Britney or something. It is just ridiculous!”

Her career seems to nicely bounce around from movies like Vanilla Sky (opposite Tom Cruise) to Gangs Of New York, to In Her Shoes, with Shrek and Shrek 2 in between. In the animated adventures, Cameron voiced the feisty and opinionated Princess Fiona (with talents like Eddie Murphy, Dame Julie Andrews and Mike Myers) and she confirms that there is a Shrek 3 on the cards for release next year. “It was the most fun thing to do,” she says, “and I rather like Fiona — she’s no-one’s fool, she’s a one-off woman, and she knows what she wants.”

Cameron’s parents are a wonderful mix of nationalities and backgrounds. Her father Emilio was originally from Cuba, and her mother Billie is part Native American, part German and part Italian. “Beat that,” laughs the five feet 10 inches Cameron, who reached that height in her mid-teens, when she started a modelling career. She was plucked from that to play opposite Jim Carrey in The Mask a few years later, and she’s never looked back.

One thing that gets her going — apart from the mention of paparazzi — is, strangely, plastic surgery, and when you mention it, she pulls a long face, and makes an ‘Urrrrgh’ noise. “Have you actually seen those shows?” she enquires with obvious urgency, “where totally ordinary people want to look like Britney or Brad? What on earth possesses them to want to destroy their own characters? To go under the knife to do that, well, that’s — that’s sick! I mean, if you want the truth, I’ve broken my nose four times in various falls and accidents (once I even broke it on my birthday, while surfing in Hawaii!), and I just take it that this is the way I am, or am going to be. I wouldn’t dream, now, of having it all fixed!”

She reflects that women today, “are the main reason for all this — and the sooner we all accept that, at some point, we are going to die, the richer a life, short or long, we’ll all have. Doing nips and tucks and pins on our faces will not have anything to do with our ultimate fate. Me? I’d like to pull a grin or blink or make a face without it all coming undone . . . and if anyone invents a ray gun which, when used, undoes every face job in Beverly Hills, well, I want to be around when whoever it is pulls the trigger!”

She’s warming to her passion here, and goes on to condemn the whole process of paying for beauty to be “dangerous”. Cameron says, “It is not the right message for young women, in particular. Beauty comes from the inside. When I see women who have had plastic surgery, I find it, well, unnerving. All I can see is the surgery — the person who has had it done has vanished beneath it. I don’t want to look like that — ever!”

And then, with a grin she adds, “The ‘embalmed look’ really doesn’t register or work with me. What we women need to do, instead of worrying about what we don’t have, is to love what we do have! Despite what some people seem to think — still — I don’t believe my career has been built on my looks. After all, look at the movies that I’ve done! I wasn’t Miss Model in Being John Malkovich or in The Gangs Of New York. Just because I enjoy what I do, and I find myself blessed with a fun career doesn’t mean that I don’t work my butt off, you know!”

But she does admit that she hires a personal trainer as “a celebrity indulgence” (and she blushes as she says the words) and he comes in “three times a week.” Then there are her hobbies of snowboarding and surfing. She doesn’t seem to sit still for a minute. 

She recently worked with movie legend Shirley MacLaine. “It turned out that she had and still shares the same views that I do. She’s never had anything done — ever. Shirley never lets you get away from the fact that she is who she is. But once you get to know her — and she wants to know who you are first, believe me, it’s just a constant round of stories, discussions, and gossip about what all we women are interested in. Jobs, careers, other women, men!”

The way that she picks her movies, she insists, “is not about how much I will be paid, what a blockbuster it might turn out to be, and how much it could enhance or advance my career. I look for a really good script, a character that I play who goes on a journey, and something that provides a challenge with a few issues. I like to play real women and special characters that anyone can relate to. But I learned a valuable lesson when I worked with Julia (Roberts, on My Best Friend’s Wedding), one that I was aware of before but which was then made very clear, is that when you are the star of the movie, the crew looks to you every day to set the tone of the work. So that, when you come in, whatever it is that you are giving off, that will be the tone of the working conditions. So it is always — for me — 100 per cent!”

Next, she’ll be seen in a movie called Holiday and after that, she shrugs, “Who knows?” And then she reflects, “Your regrets aren’t what you did, but rather what you didn’t do. So I grab every opportunity. It’s been said that, in Hollywood, there are only 14 different scripts. I am always looking for number 15!”

By Phil Penfold/Planet Syndication.