Renée Zellweger

Renée Zellweger (born April 25, 1969, Katy, Texas, U.S.) American film actress who was known for her portrayals of vulnerable characters in such films as Jerry Maguire (1996), Nurse Betty (2000), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), and Judy (2019).

Zellweger began acting while she was a student at the University of Texas (B.A., 1991), initially in commercials. She had a small role in the 1992 TV movie A Taste for Killing. After an uncredited appearance in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), Zellweger earned her first movie credit with a bit part in Reality Bites (1994), directed by Ben Stiller. She had leading roles in the minor Texas films Love and a .45 (1994) and Empire Records (1995), and she starred with a then equally unknown Matthew McConaughey in The Return of the Texas Chainsaw MassacreThe Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1994; rereleased as Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation). Zellweger’s surprise casting as the love interest of Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire catapulted her to stardom.

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Zellweger won a Golden Globe Award for her role as a sweetly deluded waitress in Neil LaBute’s Nurse Betty (2000), and she received nominations for a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, and an Academy Award as well as both critical and popular praise for her portrayal of a British woman bent on self-improvement in Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), based on a best-selling 1996 novel by Helen Fielding. She earned a second Golden Globe Award and a second Oscar nomination for best actress for her performance as the murderess Roxie Hart in the musical Chicago (2002). Zellweger showed her range with her portrayal of the gruff and capable Ruby Thewes in the American Civil War melodrama Cold Mountain (2003), a performance that netted her the BAFTA, the Golden Globe, and the Oscar for best supporting actress.

Zellweger’s later films included the sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004); the biopic Miss Potter (2006), in which she played the children’s author Beatrix Potter; George Clooney’s football comedy Leatherheads (2008); the coming-of-age story My One and Only (2009); and the further sequel Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016). She played a woman who encourages her art-dealer husband to befriend a homeless man in Same Kind of Different As Me (2017), which was based on the best-selling memoir of the same name. In 2019 Zellweger was cast as a venture capitalist who makes an indecent proposal in the Netflix series What/If. That same year she starred in the biopic Judy, assuming the role of Hollywood icon Judy Garland at the tail end of her career. For her performance, Zellweger received both an Oscar and a Golden Globe Award for best actress. She next appeared as a murderer in The Thing About Pam (2022), a true-crime TV miniseries.