Cameron Diaz

Diaz’s most culturally interesting film of the 2010s wasn’t one of her star vehicles — it was the comedy where she functioned as the on-ramp for another career’s pivot. In The Other Woman (2014), Diaz played Carly Whitten, a New York attorney who discovers her boyfriend is married and teams up with his wife and another mistress for revenge. Playing Carly’s assistant Lydia was Nicki Minaj, in her first-ever live-action film role (Business Standard). The casting story is stranger than the film’s plot. Director Nick Cassavetes noticed Minaj while she was judging American Idol and called her in for an interview; she hadn’t been actively pursuing a film role and had, in her words, barely an hour to herself (WebProNews). She filmed her part in a single week in New York, arriving barely on time after finishing Idol, performing live at the Billboard Music Awards, and taking a red-eye from Los Angeles (WebProNews). Acting was, for her, unfinished business: a drama student at New York City’s LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts, she had once expected to be “Halle Berry status” by nineteen, and she mused to Marie Claire that after three more albums she might trade music for acting entirely — “One day, when I start getting a couple gray hairs, maybe it will all be only acting” (OK! Magazine). She prepared for Lydia by exchanging a series of text messages with Alex Cassavetes, and said Diaz was very supportive on set — Diaz even told her that her performance made Lydia “more likable on screen than it appeared in the script” (WebProNews). The film opened at number one at the U.S. box office that May, and Minaj shared an Instagram photo thanking fans for the weekend (WebProNews). Afterward she began auditioning for bigger things, saying she wanted a role “custom-made” for her rather than a “humungous role” right away (Business Standard). Two years later the detour proved real: Minaj was cast as Draya in Barbershop: The Next Cut (2016) (Sportskeeda). Diaz herself was asked about shooting alongside the newcomer and answered simply: “I love Nicki. She was fantastic. She blew us all away. She, you know, was so funny, so natural… what she had to do was difficult; it wasn’t easy, and she showed up and she just nailed it completely.” (Sportskeeda)

That generosity toward a first-timer is a fitting coda to Diaz’s first act, because she had entered the business herself as an absolute outsider. Born August 30, 1972, in San Diego, California, she made her film debut at 21 opposite Jim Carrey in the comedy The Mask (1994) (Golden Globes). A supporting turn in My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) came next, and then the film that made her a star: the Farrelly brothers’ There’s Something About Mary (1998), which brought her increased fame and her first Golden Globe nomination (Golden Globes). She played the next move shrewdly. In 1999 alone she played an arena football team’s owner in Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday and the puppeteer’s obsessed lover in Spike Jonze’s surreal Being John Malkovich — the latter earning a second Golden Globe nomination and a reputation as a dramatic actress (Golden Globes). The 2000s built the commercial empire: Charlie’s Angels (2000) with Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu, the acclaimed supporting roles in Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky (2001) and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002) — each earning another Golden Globe nomination — and the beginning of her long run as Princess Fiona in the Shrek franchise (Golden Globes; NewstalkZB). The run continued through The Holiday (2006), Bad Teacher (2011), and 2014’s three-comedy year — The Other Woman, Sex Tape, and Annie (Golden Globes). In 2013 she had been named the highest-paid actress over 40 in Hollywood by The Hollywood Reporter (NewstalkZB).

Then she walked away, and — this is the part her biographies usually skip — she was explicit that it was a decision, not a drift. In 2018, during an Entertainment Weekly reunion interview with her Sweetest Thing co-stars, Christina Applegate called herself “semi-retired” and Diaz answered: “And I am actually retired” (Entertainment Weekly). At the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in October 2024 she explained it plainly: “It felt like something I had to do to reclaim my own life. And I just really didn’t care about anything else” (Entertainment Weekly). Over the decade she had “said no to everything” and put “most of my focus” on her family and her wine company (NewstalkZB). She called the break “the best 10 years” of her life on The Graham Norton Show in 2025 (Entertainment Weekly).

The wine company turned out to be a serious second business, and its mechanics are more interesting than the usual celebrity-label story. Diaz and serial entrepreneur Katherine Power discovered they shared a frustration — wine labels disclose almost nothing — and decided in 2020 to build a brand around transparency: 100% organically farmed grapes, no additives, with ingredients and nutrition facts printed on the bottle (Dr. Liz Thach MW). Getting there wasn’t easy; every label submitted to the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau came back for changes — sometimes five or six rounds — before approval landed in about two months (Dr. Liz Thach MW). They launched in July 2020, in the depths of the pandemic, signed fifteen distributors over Zoom tasting sessions, and within roughly two and a half years had passed $20 million in sales revenue — becoming the number-two organic wine brand in U.S. retail and number one in the organic ultra-premium segment, growing retail revenue 97% year over year and selling close to 150,000 cases a year, mostly from organically farmed grapes in France, Spain, and Italy (Dr. Liz Thach MW). The strategy was deliberate anti-intimidation: skip varietal and terroir signifiers for plain red, white, rosé, and sparkling, because their target consumers — millennials — found the traditional language off-putting (Dr. Liz Thach MW). Diaz and Power still traveled to Europe once or twice a year to taste with their suppliers, and the brand stayed venture-backed, with a possible change of control on the table (Dr. Liz Thach MW).

The return happened the way it had to: one person she couldn’t refuse. Jamie Foxx — her Annie co-star and a friend from Any Given Sunday back in 1999 — called with an action-comedy, and Diaz later said, “How do you say no to Jamie Foxx when he says, ‘Hey, I’ve got this big action comedy that we can just have so much fun on’” (NewstalkZB). Back in Action, a Netflix film about retired CIA operatives Emily and Matt pulled back into espionage, arrived in January 2025 and reached number one in 85 countries with 46.8 million views on its debut, according to Netflix’s own reporting (mxdwn). Diaz was careful not to define the moment — “I reserve the right to say no to doing a movie ever again, and I reserve the right to say yes if I decide to” — and declared a new genre boundary: “No more rom-coms, only mom-coms” (NewstalkZB). As of 2026 she was slated to appear in Jonah Hill’s dark comedy Outcome with Keanu Reeves, the Netflix action-comedy Bad Day, and to reprise Princess Fiona in Shrek 5 (Entertainment Weekly).

What this profile does not claim

• It does not give a release date for Outcome, Bad Day, or Shrek 5; sources conflict on those timelines, and this profile names them as upcoming rather than dated.
• It does not assert the reported $45-million Netflix paycheck for Diaz’s return; that figure rests on a single Bloomberg-via-entertainment-press report this profile did not independently corroborate.
• It does not claim newer Avaline sales figures beyond the 2023 reporting; figures published after that were not traced to their original source.
• It does not cover Diaz’s modeling years or early family background in detail; those details were available only at snippet level in this research pass and are held for a future update.