Being Beatrix

1/6

5 April 2012

Americans, eh? They come over here and they take all our women's roles. Just five years after she triumphantly snaffled the part of Bridget Jones from a baying horde of British actresses, Renée Zellweger is back playing an even more warmly treasured English icon. In Chris Noonan's gently charming Miss Potter, the Oscar-winning Texan actress makes a case for children's author Beatrix Potter not just as a neglected feminist icon, fighting for independence and authorial integrity in a male-dominated world, but also as a protoenvironmentalist, engaged in pioneering conservation projects in her beloved Lake District.

"Al Gore would love her," said Time magazine's reviewer, while praising the film's decency and the delicacy of Zellweger's-performance. "But, dammit, so do we." Other critics have lauded the actress's careful depiction of the long, virginal years Potter spent living with her parents, and her belated and ultimately tragic relationship with her publisher Norman Warne, played by Ewan McGregor. "It is a lovely performance," writes one online scribe. And a challenging one: Zellweger and her impeccable English accent are scarcely off-screen for the film's 92 minutes.

"When I first read the script, I felt I knew who Beatrix Potter was," says 37-year-old Zellweger. "I understood why her growing up informed the woman she became. I understood why she became more and more reserved because of the restrictions placed on her. Quite apart from her extraordinary professional life, she went through so much privately. I felt a strong kinship with her. In her younger years she tried to conform to the woman she was meant to be, and I guess we all have a bit of that in us. But she was fiercely private, and successful in keeping the things that mattered most to her away from the public gaze."

Here, Zellweger might indeed be talking about herself, as I discover when we come to discuss her infamous romantic past: the relationships with co-star Jim Carrey, with musician Jack White, and, allegedly, with her friend and soon-to-be director George Clooney; her disastrous, fourmonth marriage in 2005 to country singer Kenny Chesney. For now, though, she's happy to expound on the pleasures, and the problems, of being Beatrix.

Zellweger is slender again - after four years yo-yoing for the Bridget Jones movies - which made getting into Beatrix's corsets easier ("I am not an authority on weight loss," has always been her tart response to questions on this topic). Her voice has also regained its American twang, although she spoke with an upper-crust English accent while shooting Miss Potter, on and off camera. "I didn't want to go through the struggle of getting back to the appropriate place every morning, and I didn't want to think about what my mouth was doing," she says. "It sounds dramatic but it is actually the lazy way to do things."

She also researched every aspect of Potter's life, reading her journals, visiting Hill Top (the Cumbrian home Potter lived in after Warne died), and studying the publisher's archive: "I read every bit of material that we could possibly gather." She felt more at home in England this time round than she did when shooting the BJ movies.

"I felt completely inappropriate and gross when I first came to England," she confesses. "Just grotesque a lot of times. A loud-mouthed Texan girl, you know? Very brash and forthright and rude. I didn't realise until I did the first Bridget Jones film that, no, we don't speak the same language at all. Now England feels very familiar." She also fell a little in love with the dramatic, windswept Cumbrian landscape, but this is not as surprising as it might seem.

Although she was born in Houston and brought up in rural Texas, Renée Zellweger comes from solid northern European stock, her father an engineer from Switzerland and her mother a nurse from Norway. It was a loving, no-nonsense upbringing. Zellweger didn't even think about acting until she joined the drama group at the University of Texas, when the bug bit. Her parents may have worried about her career choice, but now they are proud. "I have profound respect for my parents," she says, tearfully. "I get very emotional thinking about them because it means everything to me that they are proud."

It took a while. She made her TV debut in 1993 in the mini series Murder in the Heartland (she was murdered) and had a non-speaking role in Dazed and Confused among the then similarly-unknown Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey. She even worked as a waitress in a strip club while waiting for her big break, which came when she played Tom Cruise's love interest in 1996's Jerry Maguire.

Starring roles (Nurse Betty; Me, Myself and Irene) followed, along with a raft of award nominations. But it was Bridget Jones in 2001 that made her an international star, a position she cemented with a trouper's turn in Chicago and the thunder-stealing supporting role of Ruby Thewes in Anthony Minghella's 2003 romance, Cold Mountain, for which she won a Golden Globe, Bafta and Oscar.

If things have gone professionally right for Zellweger, though (she earned $11 million for the Bridget Jones sequel in 2004), her personal life has been a disaster. "I have been a hopeless romantic all my life," she once said, "because [my parents] have served as an example of what is possible." In her early twenties she had a long relationship with a musician called Sims Ellison, which ended when she moved to Los Angeles. Ellison committed suicide soon afterwards, which reportedly scarred Zellweger and may have prompted her determination to keep her private life private.

Subsequent relationships took place under the Hollywood radar - neither she nor Clooney have ever confirmed or denied their reported liaison - until she met Jim Carrey on the set of Me, Myself and Irene in 2001. They fell very publicly for each other despite, as she put it, his "problems expressing himself when it comes to romance". Their brief relationship ended when Zellweger allegedly told friends, "in the end I didn't want to be tied down to Jim and I left".

Her subsequent two-year fling with White Stripes star Jack White should surely have put her off musicians for good. But no, in January 2005 Zellweger met Kenny Chesney - whose first hit, You Had Me at Hello, was inspired by her famous line from Jerry Maguire - at a tsunami benefit.

In April she put their relationship on an official footing by bringing him a margarita on stage during a concert, and the following month they married in a 15-minute ceremony on a beach in the Virgin Islands. He was barefoot, she wore Caroline Herrera.

Four months later, the marriage was annulled, Zellweger citing "fraud" as the reason for the break-up, but later insisting this was "not a reflection of Kenny's character".

Has the experience put her off marriage or future romantic entanglement? "I am not going to talk about marriage," she says firmly, "because I don't want to have it somehow be misunderstood [as] my talking about my own marriage, and I can't do that." She does, however, seem prepared to make the same mistakes again. "Time is the best healer and I suppose I just get on with it," she concedes. "In my relationships and my friendships I don't have expectations. I don't judge. I love the people in my life not in spite of what other people might define as their shortcomings but because of them."

The break-up of her marriage has left her feeling rootless, however. "Home used to be where my dog was, but he died," she says. "Now it's just where the big red suitcase goes. I have my farmhouse [in The Hamptons outside New York] but I never get there because I am perpetually moving."

During Miss Potter, she toyed with the idea of moving to Britain. "I sort of found myself in the fells of north England and thought 'What's wrong with this? Nothing at all!'" she says. "It's such a beautiful place. Plus I can go and see my mother or my friends anytime because my job allows me to hop on a plane at the last minute." Her job, though, will probably also prevent Zellweger from becoming a full-time English fixture like Gwyneth Paltrow or Liv Tyler.

She's just finished a horror movie called Case 39, and is shortly to co-star with her old "friend" Clooney on a movie he is also directing, called Leatherheads. "I admire the choices he has made. He has a lot of integrity, and as a friend, he's kind, funny and charming. I am looking forward to working with him," is all she will say. And after that, there's more work. "I have committed to several things over the next year," she says. "I can't even get a new dog. It's a weird life, but I'm finding that I am more at home with the idea of work being my home."

Poor Renée. Pretty, sweet, and good at her job, but with no man, no proper home, and not even a pet to speak of. Maybe Miss Zellweger could be persuaded to put her English accent to work on a third Bridget Jones instalment.

Miss Potter is released on 5 January.

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