Renée Zellweger

The five-million-dollar contract

Renée Zellweger was born in Katy, Texas, a place where no one expects to end up with two Oscars. Her father was a Swiss engineer and her mother a Norwegian nurse. She studied English literature at the University of Texas while working as a waitress at a strip club to pay her rent.

In 1994 she appeared in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation alongside an Matthew McConaughey just as unknown as she was. It was a cheap horror film, but it helped the industry notice she had something different in her gaze.

In 1996 Tom Cruise cast her in Jerry Maguire after seeing her natural chemistry on camera. That line about hello and goodbye haunted her for decades and put her at the forefront of the industry overnight.

And it worked.

But the real big change came in 2001, when she accepted the role of a thirtysomething Londoner obsessed with calories and cigarettes. She gained twenty-five pounds for Bridget Jones's Diary and learned to speak with a British accent so precise it fooled the English themselves. That role earned her her first Oscar nomination in a category that usually overlooks romantic comedies.

In 2002 she proved she could sing and dance in Chicago while sharing the screen with Catherine Zeta-Jones. The shoot was physically exhausting, but the film ended up winning the award for Best Picture of the year.

Six years of voluntary silence

She won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Cold Mountain in 2004. During that shoot she spent months freezing in the mountains of Romania, playing a tough woman who knew how to handle an axe and look after livestock. It was the peak of her media exposure and the start of a burnout she would take years to admit.

In 2010, she decided she had nothing left to say and vanished from the Los Angeles scene. She was tired of hearing herself and needed to learn things that had nothing to do with a movie set.

She didn't shoot a single scene between 2010 and 2016.

She returned to close out the trilogy of her most famous character, then prepared for the physical challenge of Judy in 2019. She spent two hours a day in makeup to transform into Judy Garland, and studied every nervous tic of the Hollywood legend. That performance earned her her second Oscar in 2020 after a standing ovation that lasted several minutes.

In 2022 she starred in the miniseries The Thing About Pam, where she once again used facial prosthetics to play a real-life killer. The makeup process was so complex that it required four hours of prep work before filming began each morning.

Because Zellweger has always preferred the craft of the work to the glitter of the red carpet. So in 2025, she slipped back into the shoes of her most beloved character to shoot Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, directed by Michael Morris.

The budget for this fourth installment was estimated at around $35 million, and filming wrapped in London during the summer of 2024.