Back after 50: Cameron Diaz, the actress who decided to leave everything, reconciles with Hollywood eight years later

In

, a collection of anecdotes about his Hollywood career, David Niven tells the story of actress-director Alice Terry, "a merry, free spirit whose weakness was eating cream pies."

When her studio heads reprimanded her for spoiling her figure, she replied, "Okay, I'll make a million dollars as fast as I can, then I'll retire and eat cream pies."

She won it at 33 and kept her promise.

She retired from acting despite being one of the public's favorite stars.

Cameron Diaz (San Diego, 1972) was not separated from the cinema by her love of baking.

Nor was it a long thought-out move.

It just happened.

After starring in the 2014 remake of

alongside Jamie Foxx and Quvenzhané Wallis, he has not appeared in any film again.

Four years passed before she spoke about it, during a meeting with her co-stars of

Selma Blair and Christina Applegate: “I'm totally out.

Semi-retired.

I'm actually retired."

A phrase that many took as a joke between friends, but the truth is that the actress had an empty agenda for her, an unheard of fact for a woman who had starred in more than forty films in twenty years.

What had happened so that one of the highest paid actresses in the industry disappeared?

In his personal life, a lot.

In 2015, she announced her marriage to Benji Madden, guitarist for the group Good Charlotte, after a seven-month relationship and just 17 days of commitment.

She had introduced them to Nicole Richie, wife of Benji's brother, Joel Madden.

If there were a club of ephemeral marriages – surely there is one in some London bookmaker – both couples would have been in the lead, but the truth is that their marriages are idyllic, without public quarrels or scandals.

Diaz had given a lot of play to the press during his relationships with stars like Jared Leto, Alex Rodríguez or Justin Timberlake, but the only thing we know about his current marriage is that they are the parents of a girl who was born by surrogacy and whom they want to keep. away from the spotlight.

“We want to protect the privacy of the little girl.

We are not going to publish photos or share more details, with the exception that she is very, very cute, ”they wrote on their respective Instagram accounts after the birth of Raddix Madden.

Actress Cameron Diaz with her husband, Good Charlotte guitarist Benji Madden, in 2016.Donato Sardella

Since then, he has turned to his family life.

"I can't imagine being a mother, at the point where I am now, with my daughter in her first year, and having to be on a set 14 or 16 hours a day," she said last year on the program

.

He has also succumbed to another of the great hobbies of celebrities: bottling his own wine, Avaline, made with grapes from the Catalan Penedés, organic and vegan (in the process of making most alcoholic beverages, ingredients of animal origin are usually used, such as cartilage or fish tail).

His concern for well-being has materialized in the form of two books,

and

According to her, it is "a holistic, compassionate, informative and intimate look at how the female body transforms over the years and what we can do to age better" (it sure helps to be rich and have enviable genetics).

The million dollar smile

Diaz is the daughter of a Cuban-American father and an Anglo-German mother.

Born and raised in San Diego, she was discovered at 16 by a fashion industry scout at a Los Angeles nightclub.

Five years later, she made her feature film debut in

and managed to steal the shot from Jim Carrey in a film tailor-made for her elastic facial comedy.

"Cameron Diaz is a true discovery, a sex bomb with a wonderful smile and the gift of comedic timing," wrote Roger Ebert.

Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz in a scene from the movie 'The Mask' (1994). Archive Photos (Getty Images)

In her next blockbuster,

(1997) her hyperbolic smile rivaled that of Julia Roberts, she gave us a painful karaoke for the story and made us understand why she was the one who got the boy and not Julia.

She was born a star that it was impossible not to adore.

In

(1998) she was already the absolute protagonist.

The Farrelly Brothers' grossly inaccurate comedy grossed more than $370 million, redefined thug comedy and inspired writer Gillian Flynn to develop the "cool girl" archetype on which she developed

: “An attractive, bright, funny woman who loves football, poker, dirty jokes and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex and stuffs her mouth with hotdogs and hamburgers like if she was presenting the world's biggest culinary orgy while being able to somehow maintain a size 34, because cool girls, above all else, are hot."

Flynn wrote it in honor of Diaz's character, but the truth is that there is a lot of the real Diaz in that reflection.

One of his greatest prides is winning a burping contest at the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards beating Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync, and, he told

, he owns a remote control device that activates fart noises from underneath. of the cushions in your house.

"It's for the best, the problem is you can never get away with it twice, so you have to move on to the next person."

It did not matter the thick line with which his character was defined or how schematic it was.

“Diaz is capable of working in three dimensions, even if her character is limited to two,” wrote

critic Dave Kehr.

That role earned her the best actress award from the New York Film Critics Circle, an accolade that sparked so much controversy—comedy performances are always underrated—that when she went to pick it up she said, "Next time I promise to act."

“Of course, Miss Diaz had been acting, and quite well.

She just wasn't the kind of performance that traditionally wins awards as it didn't involve a foreign accent, a physical handicap, a drinking problem, or a life-threatening illness,” Dave Kehr pointed out.

Actress Cameron Diaz at the New York Critics Circle Awards Ceremony, where she received the award for Best Actress for her role in 'Something About Mary' (1998).New York Daily News Archive (NY Daily News via Getty Images)

Take note.

In her next role, she accepted the rite of passage that all the handsome men in the industry undergo at some point to aspire to the big prizes.

In

(1999) she hid her blue eyes under brown contact lenses and camouflaged her blonde hair with a frizzy black wig to play a sour puppeteer's wife.

Unrecognizable, she garnered the best reviews of her career and Golden Globe and Bafta nominations.

And she generated the juiciest gossip around her figure.

It is rumored that the character that Anna Faris plays in

(2003, Sofia Coppola), a giddy movie actress who flirts with Scarlett Johansson's husband, is inspired by her.

Recall that the director of

is Spike Jonze, Coppola's ex-husband.

The rumor had so many signs of being real that both Faris and the director were forced to deny it.

It was not his first risky role.

At the beginning of her career, she participated in small independent films such as

(1995) or

(1996), along with Jennifer Aniston.

If anything characterized the first decade of her career, it is her ability to wisely combine blockbusters with independent films.

She, too, wasn't afraid of playing poisonous characters, like the irritating, irritable girlfriend in

(1998) or the ruthless Christina Pagniacci in Oliver Stone's

(1999).

Another example of her versatility: in 2000 she melted critics with her portrayal of a blind teacher in the delicate

by Rodrigo García while sweeping the box office with the energetic film version

.

America's umpteenth girlfriend dazzled the public both in scatological films, such as the hooligan

(2002) and in

(2002), where she once again showed her talent for drama alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day Lewis.

Her director, Martin Scorsese, compared her to Carole Lombard: "Her gaze conveys both lightness and hardness."

In the highest grossing of her productions, she did not need to exhibit her beauty, since she only showed off her vocal cords: she was the voice of Fiona in the original version of

.

"There are mothers who tell me that they hear my voice 24 hours a day," she declared.

Diaz's career enjoyed an enviable balance.

(2006), one of those comfortable Nancy Meyers romantic comedies in which she swapped her life with Kate Winslet's, marked the decline of her love affair with her success.

The actresses Cameron Diaz, Lucy Liu and Drew Barrymore during the premiere of 'Charlie's Angels' (2000), in California.

Chris Polk (FilmMagic)

From then on, he seemed to have lost his compass to choose projects and embarked on proposals as unfortunate as

(2012).

It was so obvious that in 2014 Vulture asked themselves: Why can't Cameron Diaz make a good movie?

"Whether movies do well (like

) or arrive dead at the box office (like

) they can always be counted on to receive poor reviews," wrote Kyle Buchanan.

"If he keeps making bad movies, Hollywood will start losing interest in it long before the public does."

However, it was she who lost interest in Hollywood.

At least until her friend Jamie Foxx has brought her out of torpor.

At the end of the year, Netflix will premiere her new film and its title could not be more appropriate:

Back

.

Cameron Diaz left the movies at forty, when most actresses are in their prime, and returns after fifty, just when, we've always been told, Hollywood is starting to run out of good roles.

"That being old is used against you only perpetuates the myth that the old has no value," she declared a few years ago to the

.

No one like her to refute that stigma.

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