Coot cat Antonio

Playing a swashbuckling Puss In Boots got actor Antonio Banderas in trouble with 16 women. They were his leading ladies as he made his Broadway debut in the stage musical Nine and they wondered what he'd been up to when he arrived for the performance with a strained voice.

"They assumed I'd had a rough night," says the The Mask Of Zorro star, who provides the voice of Puss in animated mega-hit Shrek 2.

The real reason for his bad throat was something much odder - he'd spent hours coughing and spluttering as the screen feline vomits up a hairball.

Banderas says he didn't do any special preparation for his vocal role as the cool cat. "Actually I was very afraid, because at the time I started recording the character I was on Broadway, singing every night," he recalls. "I had a couple of problems with that, especially the day I had to do the hairball. Forty-five minutes of trying to bring that up. Then I got to the theatre, and they assumed I'd had a rough night. I had to tell them the guilty party was a cat."

His Zorro-like Puss In Boots steals the movie from under the noses of the other animated characters, including Eddie Murphy's Donkey, Cameron Diaz's Princess Fiona and Mike Myers' green ogre Shrek.

Banderas, who played Che opposite Madonna in the screen version of the musical Evita, needed no persuasion to sign up for Shrek 2. Executive producer Jeffrey Katzenberg recalls ringing up the actor. "I said, 'We're going to make Shrek...' and he said, 'Yes'. I said, 'No, no, we're going to make a sequel, and he said, 'Yes'. I said, 'We have a part in this movie for you', and he said, 'Don't you understand the word yes? Is my English that bad?'."

He still speaks with an accent but his English has improved considerably since making his American film debut in 1992 as a young Cuban musician in The Mambo Kings. That followed theatre work and Spanish films for director Pedro Almodovar. But, when he was cast in the US film, he spoke no English and had to learn all of his lines phonetically.

What Katzenberg didn't know when he offered the role was that Banderas was a big fan of the original Shrek, the computer-animated comedy that turns the fairy tale world on its head with its story of a green ogre who falls in love with a spellbound princess.

"Somebody asked me if I did this movie for my kids. No," says the actor. "It's lovely to go out with your kids to watch a movie you're part of, and see them enjoy it. I suppose Stella, who is seven-and-a-half now, will remember in 20 years time that she went to the opening of Shrek 2 in Los Angeles with her pappy.

"That's nice. But I did it because I was in love with the first one. I had a fantastic reference point, so all I had to listen to on the phone was that magic word - Shrek.

"I actually have the first Shrek at home. My daughter say it's maybe twice, but I watched it ten times. It's totally different to any animated movie that I've seen before. It was a new take on it."

When he did the sequel he understood why the first one seemed so fresh - because the team relied on the actors, not just vocally, but creatively too. As he had an input into the character, he didn't feel he was performing just the technical job of providing a voice.

"That was very important for me, because I understand that not everybody works in the same direction," he says, referring to the experience of his wife, actress Melanie Griffith, who lent her voice to the Stuart Little sequel. She came home every day saying she'd had to re-do the line 80 times until the director was satisfied.

Making Shrek 2 wasn't like that. "We had a lot of improvisation, though the scene was already set up and we saw the storyboards. We repeated the scene in many different ways to give them as much material as we could in the time that we had," he explains.

"When they put together the first animation, they started asking you questions, like what do we think the character should do at this point? Should he take the sword? Or hide behind the tree? Things like that, that I wasn't expecting to happen on an animation movie."

Following up Puss In Boots isn't going to be easy, particularly as he's started filming a Zorro sequel, again with leading lady Catherine Zeta Jones and director Martin Campbell, this summer.

"I'm going to have to work very hard to overcome this cat. I'm half expecting they'll get to the movie theatre and say, 'Do you know what, we love the cat better than that one'," he says.

Published: 01/07/2004