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More than 18 years later and there’s still something about Cameron Diaz. When the actress and producer turned 45 this week, her Good Charlotte rocker husband Benji Madden (that’d be Joel Madden’s twin brother) took to Instagram to gush about his wife in a heart emoji–laden #HBD message. “You’re my best friend and I’m so thankful for you, sometimes I just want to tell the world,” he wrote, before ratting off a list of her best qualities. We, too, are celebrating Diaz, but with some lesser-known facts. Here, in honor of her birthday, five things you may not have known about Cameron Diaz.
1. When Cameron Diaz was up for her scene-stealing turn in The Mask, she was working as a model. Though she had appeared in several big-budget commercials, including for Nivea and Coke, she didn’t have a single acting credit to her name. “I’m a pretty girl who’s a model who doesn’t suck as an actress,” she said shortly after the film’s 1994 release. Hesitant to cast a relative unknown, New Line Cinema insisted Diaz read with costar Jim Carey 12 times before offering her the part. “I was ready to have a nervous breakdown,” Diaz later said. “I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. I got an ulcer.”
2. We all remember when an underwear-clad Diaz practiced her booty shake in the mirror in Charlie’s Angels. In fact, Diaz has been perfecting her dance skills since high school. At Long Beach Polytechnic High School, Diaz was a member of the dance team, the Polyettes, and performed during halftime at football games. It’s no wonder that the disco-dancing dream sequence with which viewers were introduced to her character, Natalie, came easily to the actress. “Cameron didn’t even take too much time learning this choreography,” Charlie’s Angels director McG said of the scene. “She’s just such a natural athlete. She got it together within an hour of rehearsal.”
3. Diaz went to high school with Snoop Dog. “She ran with my homegirls, all my little cheerleading homegirls,” the rapper once recalled. “She was fly and she was hip.” Offering further proof that some things don’t change, Diaz described a teenage Snoop in an interview with George Lopez. “He was very tall and skinny. He wore lots of ponytails,” she said. “And I’m pretty sure I bought weed from him.”
4. Diaz codesigned her costumes for Charlie’s Angels, including the hip-hugging outfit in which she gyrated to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.” “Cameron went absolutely nuts and had a really good time,” McG said of her collaboration with costume designer Joseph Aulisi. Diaz told Vogue that good times were had throughout filming, too. “It’s really ridiculous how much fun we had,” she said. “I mean—learning kung fu from a master, putting on one cute costume after another, working with a director like McG, plus hanging out all day long with two of your best girlfriends—it’s not exactly having bamboo shoved under your fingernails.”
5. Also a health and fitness author, Diaz is a longtime admirer of that OG icon of aging gracefully: Helen Mirren. “That woman is drop-dead sexy,” Diaz has said. “She’s not trying to turn back the hands of time, she is just taking care of herself.” The same might be said of this week’s birthday girl, who is walking, talking proof that age is just a number. “It’s all a matter of how old your spirit is,” Diaz has said. “Some 50-year-olds are still 35.”
