Fresh from last month's best supporting actress Oscar win Catherine Zeta-Jones is to produce and star in an adaptation of the American stage play Getting and Spending, about a New York investment banker who takes on the system.

According to Screen Daily, the Swansea-born star will produce the project through her company, Milkwood Films, with further production muscle provided by Pathe Pictures and Starboard Entertainment. "I have had a longtime interest in the material and am looking forward to its fruition," the actress has said.

The work of attorney-turned-writer Michael J Chepiga, Getting and Spending is a romantic legal thriller in the vein of Adam's Rib. Zeta-Jones will play the lead role of Victoria, a corporate Robin Hood who donates her stock market winnings to charity. But when Victoria is accused of insider trading, she goes in search of renowned defence attorney Richard O'Neill, who has given up his own brilliant career in order to join a Franciscan monastery in Kentucky. With true Hollywood inevitability, love soon blooms between client and attorney.

Production on Getting and Spending is tentatively scheduled for the end of the year. In the meantime, Mrs Michael Douglas has a whole raft of projects at various stages of completion, including roles in the Coen brothers' Intolerable Cruelty and DreamWorks's animated take on Sinbad. Next up is a role opposite her husband in the Stephen Frears thriller Monkeyface.

In the meantime, Douglas has dismissed his wife's former paramours as "idiots" in an interview with the London Evening Standard. Discussing his courtship of the actress, the Wall Street star remarked that: "I found out that she had strong family ties and had her fair share of knocks as far as relationships were concerned. She'd been with her fair share of idiots." Past lovers of Z-J include Simply Red singer Mick Hucknall and TV presenter John Leslie, who was arrested last December in connection with allegations of rape and indecent assault.