“Bridget Jones Takes Paris,” by Vicki Woods, was originally published in the April 2001 issue of Vogue.
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Renée Zellweger is perched on a little gilt chair in a Paris salon, waiting for Oscar de la Renta’s Balmain show to begin. Stardust—major, major, big-time Hollywood-box-office stardust—is drifting around her like smoke. Vogue flew her to Paris for the couture only hours after her triumph at the Golden Globes (Best Actress—Musical or Comedy, Nurse Betty; neat movie), but there are way bigger triumphs ahead for Renée Zellweger. The long-awaited film of Helen Fielding’s bestselling comic masterpiece Bridget Jones’s Diary, in which she stars, opens this month on both sides of the Atlantic. And about five minutes after that, Zellweger will be one of the biggest female stars in the world.
Because it’s her movie. With every step she takes, with every adorably clunky bad life choice she makes, with every glass of Chardonnay she slurps, with every word she utters (in her perfectly pitched London accent), she is Bridget Jones. Yes, yes, she’s got two fabulous leading men to play off: Hugh Grant, cast brilliantly against type as the silver-tongued slimebag Daniel Cleaver, is sexier and funnier than he’s ever been without that foppish trademark—uh, stutter—getting in the way. And Colin “Mr. Darcy in a Damp Shirt” Firth—Helen Fielding’s real-life pinup—is as sardonic and smoldering and rocklike as Bridget Jones’s possible savior ought to be. They’re both great; the script is great; the film is great. But it’s Zellweger’s movie. There isn’t a woman in the world who has ever sat miserably waiting for the phone to ring, watching reruns of Sex and the City and scarfing down Haagen-Dazs (counts as protein, possibly? so v. v. g. possibly?), who won’t be ravished by her Bridget Jones.
Helen Fielding is thrilled with her. “Bridget’s very human, which is why women respond to her. She is not one of those women like Liz Hurley, who never have a bad-hair day. Renée is the kind of actress who can look ordinary sometimes and quite beautiful at others, like most of us in real life.” When Bridget takes a ride in Daniel Cleaver’s sports car, Fielding recalls, “she drives off looking like Grace Kelly and, of course, loses her scarf so she ends up looking like Lenny the Lion.”
Meanwhile, here we are at Balmain, and Zellweger is beaming. Zellweger is radiant. Zellweger is as slender as a stick of spaghetti in a knockout cream outfit that skims her tiny waist. It’s Chanel couture, dazzling on the runway only a few hours ago; Vogue picked it out for her the minute the show was over. In a frenzied fit of fashion forwardness, Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel show brilliantly reinvented the suit for spring 2001, by the genius masterstroke of tucking the jackets inside the skirts. It’s so genius (and it looks so fabulous on her) that Zellweger can’t stop marveling at the exquisite construction that holds the two parts together. (Later, she unbuttons the skirt panel to show me how it’s crafted. “Look, it’s so fantastic, this part holds the jacket part down,” she says. “So no matter how you move, it moves with you, and it makes you look skinny." Skinny? Zellweger s tummy is flat as a plank. Her couture-size body is tightly muscled and lean. Where in hell is the weight she packed on for Bridget Jones? Fifteen pounds? “Twenty!” says Zellweger sweetly. “But I lost it already.”)
She’s seated between two gloriously coiffed ladies, Deeda Blair and Patricia Altschul (both longtime de la Renta fans). The two big hairdos bend toward her, talking animatedly, pointing at various outfits on the runway, and checking numbers in the program. They seem mesmerized by her. Partly, I imagine, because of the stardust that surrounds her; partly because Renée Zellweger is one of the most instantaneously friendly people on the planet, with a sweetness that makes you want to please her. And partly, of course, because she looks so knockout in that Chanel. I know, I know—a woman’s worth is measured by more than the sum of her wardrobe, but clothes like these are so powerful they’re practically magnetic. And anyway, wearing a fabulous outfit doesn’t exactly rot the human brain, does it? (When I ask Mrs. Blair what they’d been talking about, she says, “Architecture!”—about which Zellweger is “so knowledgeable!” So there. Oh—and her “exquisite Manolo Blahnik shoes!”)
Zellweger, a cute-faced, girly-voiced, prettily mannered Texan (with a steely core I find out about later), likes to run and hike through the Hollywood Hills with her dog Dylan (a.k.a. “Woof” and 20 other pet names). She dresses in sweats and boots and some nice bits of vintage from Lily et Cie, like every other young actress in Hollywood. But the Bridget Jones tsunami is rolling already, and any minute now she is going to need bushels of powerful clothes. She’s moving into another sphere. (Gaaah! Bridget Jones-speak.) Being Zellweger, one of the most intensely prepared actors I have ever met, she’s working this hectic week of shows/shoots/parties/lunches/dinners/fittings/appointments and “Thank you for your gorgeous flowers, Jean Paul”s with the kind of total commitment that she famously puts into her work. “It s a learning experience for me,” she says—and she’s learning it from the top down and the ground up.
The fun parts are head-turningly diva-ish: Her suite at the Ritz is banked with roses, lilies, field flowers, invitations, pretty little cadeaux; there are bodyguards; the clothes she’s trying on and fitting are straight off the catwalk and therefore an enviable whole season ahead of everybody else’s. The hard parts are awesome to watch. Zellweger has to slave for the photo shoots like any put-upon model. Youhave to shoot couture fast: There’s only one finished garment of each style. And you have to shoot spring/summer couture in chilly winter weather. So while everyone else is dressed for the Arctic, Zellweger leaps nine lanes of killer French traffic in a howling wind, a sliver of sunshine, and a thigh-high Gaultier flapper dress made of half a yard of silver mesh and a million icy crystals. “Jump!” Arthur Elgort yells, and Zellweger remembers, mid-leap, “I forgot my underpants!” as the rain turns to snow.
Later, she clings to freezing pieces of fairground equipment in tropical-colored Versace. Then she’s in fabulous couture-for-the-L. A.-crowd pants and a T-shirt (and thin sleet), posing with John Galliano on a tricycle while they both screech with laughter at the antics of his cute little puppy Cheyenne. She adores the Dior baby dolls—huge, beautiful crinolines decorated in Andy Warhol Pop-art fashion with appliques of household equipment, like vacuum cleaners and irons.
Maybe the biggest challenge of all is the taxi. “The taxi!” she says later, choking with laughter. “Ohmigod, and the poor guy!” She has to change from a Balmain cobweb no bigger than a pashmina into a Dior baby doll that is much, much bigger than the taxi. “Where,” she asks, with feeling, as the dress is fed carefully, foot by precious foot, into the taxi, “is the location van?” and is told it’s too big to fit in the street. Change, honey, change. She changes. Halfway through, she notices the driver still sitting in the front seat, and tells him, in commendable French, “Please leave—there are naked women here!” Alas, the driver just blew in from Benin and doesn’t understand a word.
She makes a spectacular entrance into Yves Saint Laurent, staged in the gilt-lined salon of the Hotel Inter-Continentale. She arrives dramatically late, flanked by a small entourage of Vogue’s André Leon Talley, her publicist, and Elgort. (The room is full to bursting, so they leave the three bodyguards outside.) The first two models are already on the runway, so Zellweger can’t cross it; instead she ducks down and resolutely hops and crawls toward her seat, apologizing to the elegant knees of the front row as she goes. The runway photographers, caged in a kind of bullpen at the back, don’t connect until she finally makes it to the little gilt chair, which has been advertising mlle renée zellweger in her absence. Suddenly, they catch the whiff of stardust and begin growling her name (it sounds very throatily sexy in French: “Ghrrun-ay! Ghrrun-ay!”). One or two of them burst from the pen, Nikons blazing like Uzis, and are viciously beaten back. The photographers are anxious for a star picture—there’s only the French president’s wife and Catherine Deneuve otherwise, and a ratlike little guy who is goalkeeper for the French national soccer team. But Zellweger is blithely unaware of the buzz as she concentrates on the show.
When it’s over, her exit from Saint Laurent is even starrier than her entrance. Still radiant, she is almost lifted through the doors by the towering figure of Talley and the bodyguards, who desperately try to scythe down the oncoming waves of photographers waving their weapons (zoom lenses, telecams, sound booms) in her face. Resolutely, politely, Zellweger keeps saying, “OK, one picture, one, OK?” It’s like watching Gladiatorwith better manners—no sooner is one warrior down (and trodden on and squealing) than ten more take his place. As she reaches the lobby, two little French girls fling something right over her head that traps her inside like a gladiator’s net—my God, what is this? Oh, a Nurse Betty billboard poster! “Sign, Ghrrun-ay, please sign!” She emerges from the trapping, flapping paper, signs, breathes, “Thank you so much! Thank you!,” is whirled down the steps and practically flung into her limo. Where she lies back on the seat and giggles helplessly.
The high point of the week is Vogue’s party in her honor. Stardust still drifting, Zellweger sits between Jean Paul Gaultier and John Galliano, alongside Marc Jacobs and Stella McCartney and Olivier Theyskens. (She asks McCartney how to get her Chloé skirt to hang right, and Stella tells her. It wasn’t the skirt, Zellweger insists, it was her.) She meets Viktor Rolf and Nicolas Ghesquiere and Amanda Harlech from Chanel (another enviably whip-thin body in that genius tucked-in jacket) and stylist Issy Blow. Zellweger’s in a black corded-silk strapless vintage dress. (It’s a tricky night to pick a living designer when they re all around the room, blowing you kisses and downing champagne.) Whose is it? “Um, it’s so old there s no label in it.”
When her surprise cake arrives, with its specially sprayed golden-globe atop, she is dumbstruck, and to yells of “Speech! Speech!” she says something along the lines of “I am overcome by all this. You have all been so kind and so wonderful, and I am just so thrilled that you have let me be a part of your amazing world for a week.” She makes to sit down but jumps back up to add, “And I have learned so much!” And she has, too. “The craftsmanship. It’s unbelievable. The hours that go into it and the thought that goes into it,” she says. “The way it falls, the combination of the color with the fabric. It frankly leaves me stupefied. These beautiful, amazing, colorful pieces of intricate work—that’s something I never imagined I would be part of. This is such a burning experience for me. I ll never not know about this world again.”
It s easy to see why people love working with her. She’ll work until she drops. When I call her leading men to ask about Zellweger, both of them fall over themselves to get across how unbelievably grounded she is, how nice, how normal. Acting is a notoriously flouncy profession “for actors of either sex,” says Colin Firth. “But Renée’s game for everything. All the time. There was no preciousness, no sort of ‘I’m feeling a bit brittle today, so you better not come near me.’ She’s one of the least precious people I’ve ever met.” (Precious, in British English, does not mean “adorable,” I should say. It means “revoltingly babyish and self-centered.”) Hugh Grant, who admits to being a wee bit flouncy himself, says, “She just was the most unqueeny, untantrumy, easy, nice, well-adjusted person.”
It’s true that Zellweger is very Southern: more in her demeanor than in her speech. Her off-camera voice is not at all the “Texas twang” I keep reading about (though Tom Ford tells me he hears it loud and clear. “But then, I’m from Texas”). And why would it be? Her father, Emil, is Swiss, and grew up speaking French, German, Swiss- German and Spanish as well as English. He became an American citizen after World War II. He s an engineer, Zellweger says, who builds TVs “from the microchip up” for fun. “He’s a real academic, and at the same time, he’s such a guy. Anything you want done, you know.” Zellweger’s having a house built in Los Angeles, in which her dad takes a keen interest. “They came for Christmas, and he had three different design plans in his head for the front of the house, you know? Determining which would be more aesthetic in terms of ... [perfectly timed comic pause] drainage.” Her mother, Kjelfrid, is from Norway, “the very far North of Norway,” and adds Swedish and Danish, as well as Norwegian, to the family language bank. Her mom was a child under Nazi occupation (“She dreamed or oranges for years” and couldn’t go to school, because the occupying forces wouldn’t allow lights. “So— ha-ha—forget trying to play sick growing up. Forget it!” says Zellweger.
What you can’t miss is the Southern manners—pretty, courtly, formal. She thanks people (and not just big people) with a breathy girliness that leaves them beaming and eager to do her service. Waiters, porters, concierges, drivers—anything. Mademoiselle Zellouegaire, anything! Her charm is innate, but it’s also useful. When I press her to talk about Jim Carrey, with whom she had a relationship (after Me, Myself Irene) that now seems to be over, she ducks, blanks, feints, and pleads for release with such relentless sweetness that I feel like the world’s worst bitch for ever mentioning his name.
Her charm also masks her grit, amply demonstrated in Bridget Jones’s Diary. Take the body transformation. Where on earth did she put 20 pounds on this lithe frame? Well, check out the movie, and you’ll see. She put it exactly where you and I always put it—when we lose concentration for five minutes, and then weep. (No, no, I mustn’t say “weep.” I mean, she doesn’t look like Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor or anything.) She’s just a little creamier, a little slacker. Softer, schlumpier, fuzzier. No clean lines. Her face—Bridget’s face, I should say—is a bit puffy. There’s a chin. And her body’s a little lumpy. There’s a tummy, a chest. A not fantastically knockout sort of a chest—just a chesty sort of chest. Zellweger says, “I had a good bra.” She means she had a really bad bra. And unbearably ordinary, unhelpful clothes. Helen Fielding admired the way she worked so hard at gaining weight. “She put on such a lot—but she was still thinner than me,” she says, laughing.
When Zellweger first met with scriptwriter Richard Curtis and director Sharon Maguire, the two things under discussion were “the weight issue” and “the voice issue.” (Amazingly enough—for Bridget Jones wonks—I have to tell you that Sharon Maguire is one of Fielding’s real-life best friends, and the actual “Shazzer” of the books.) The production company had Zellweger coached by Barbara Berkery (who worked with Gwyneth Paltrow on Shakespeare in Love and Sliding Doors), and then, before filming started, they cunningly placed her as an “intern” in the London offices of Picador, the real-life publishers of the Diary. As “Bridget Cavendish” from Hampshire, Zellweger worked diligently for two weeks in the publicity department, speaking British English and trying not to blow her cover. “I felt a fraud,” she says, “because everybody was so nice.” Her duties included clipping articles about Bridget Jones’s Diary from the daily press. Some of which were about her. Some of which were outrageously rude and hurtful. Only her “boss” was in on the secret—though one guy in the office said that the new intern “looked just like the girl in Jerry Maguire” once too often, at which point he was hauled off, told, “She is the girl in Jerry Maguire! So just shut up!” and sworn into the conspiracy.
The “weight issue” she solved herself. It was important to her. Bridget Jones is a lovable but careless, untoned, gym-free slacker who weighs a fluctuating 120 to 136 pounds. Zellweger is a fit, muscled, energetic actress who is happiest between 100 and 110 pounds. She hates rich foods, she says. She enjoys raw spinach and egg white, “I don’t have a sweet tooth, I don’t drink a lot, I don’t like ice cream, I don’t like sweets, I don’t like cookies.” She looks at my disbelieving face and yells with laughter. “I don’t like them! Except once a month—and you know when it is; I don’t have to tell you—a Reese s Peanut Butter Cup is my reason for living. But this is not the girl I m going to play! She smokes, she drinks, she doesn’t get a lot of sleep. She has lots and lots of liquor at the end of the day—and you need to see that.”
So she bulked up? “No, I didn’t. I didn’t get fat. I got a different body.” You bulked up, Renée. You did a complete DeNiro. “No—I—changed—my body type,” she says sweetly. “To authenticate this character physically, it had to be done. Or forget it. It’s a phenomenally important book to so many women. It was self-preservation. I wasn’t going to go in there and presume that we didn’t have to go all the way. I didn’t want padding. None of that.”
For the eight months of filming, Zellweger virtually lived Bridget Jones’s life. She ate poison carbs and killer fats, pizzas and Snickers bars. She drank wine every day, and Guinness and protein-powder shakes. “I was alone. Every day, I went home to my apartment by myself and had dinner by myself. I was really, really tired because I didn’t have the energy I was used to from exercising, and the foods I was eating were really rich and high in fat and carbohydrate. Um-and lots of sugar, so there’s lots of ups and downs. I’d hit the answering machine, go straight to the fridge for my glass of Chardonnay— I’m not kidding!—go to bed alone, get up alone, go to work.”
Zellweger’s biggest fear in prepping for her role, she says, was that she would be “the weak link. Especially with those guys, you know?” Hugh Grant had been her pin-up for years, ever since she was at the University of Texas at Austin, taking journalism classes and making the odd TV commercial. And she knew all about Mr. Wet-Shirt Darcy from A&E’s Pride and Prejudice. “But they were fantastic,” she says. “And completely supportive. From the beginning.” She didn’t need support, Grant tells me. “She waltzed in at the first read-through—which is fucking frightening for any actor, sitting round a table at nine in the morning, 40 other people. producers and studio and stuff. It’s frightening for any of us, working in our own language. But to come in and for the first time do something in a British accent—I mean, beyond terrifying. And she just nailed it. Straight off.”