'I WASN'T HEALTHY'
Renee Zellweger reveals she struggled with life and the pressures of fame just like Judy Garland
IT’S the part being tipped to revive Renee Zellweger’s movie career and bring her Oscar glory.
But playing Judy Garland — the tragic screen legend who struggled with life in the spotlight and away from the cameras — is a story she knows only too well.
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Renee, 50, shot to fame in the Nineties and gained critical acclaim in the Noughties.
By 2010 she was burnt out and quit showbusiness after a string of flop films and doomed relationships.
The new biopic, Judy, shows how the Wizard Of Oz star also had a rollercoaster career and a long line of disastrous partners before dying of a drug overdose aged 47 in 1969.
But while that singer and actress’ career was on a downward spiral, Renee is returning to form after a six-year break during which she rebuilt her life.
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The parallels are not lost on the Bridget Jones star.
She said: “I’ve experienced a little bit of the things that are challenging when you’ve lived that life. But [Judy] just kept going. She just didn’t quit.
“The film contextualised the less- kind press you read about her in her later years. It wasn’t just that this person was a mess, it was much more complicated and nuanced.
“I was very curious as to why they sent it to me.
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“She’s considered one of the greatest vocal performers of all time and I don’t consider myself a vocalist.”
Renee added: “There are certain things about Judy’s experiences I might understand.
“People are depending on you. We all deal with this stuff.
“It’s just a different experience, in that we deal with it publicly.”
‘JUDY WAS ALWAYS THERE'
Renee threw herself into the role, devouring books, footage of old TV shows and watching Judy’s performances on YouTube to perfect her unmistakable body language.
She said: “Judy was fascinating. There was always one more thing I wanted to watch or read or learn about her.
“I had YouTube videos reflected in a mirror and I stood next to it. I was watching and doing my best to emulate her. I’d listen to her music every day, I’d watch footage of her before I went to bed. She was always there, always present.
“I had to get myself into Judy’s environment — her voice, her speech patterns, the moments of vulnerability in her life that make you cry.”
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But Renee did not have to go far to find inspiration to play an entertainer struggling to cope with the pressure of fame — and when it starts to fade.
When she received her first Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in Cold Mountain in 2004, Renee was at the peak of her career.
She had already had two other Oscar nominations, for playing Bridget Jones and also Roxie Hart in Chicago.
But from 2008 onwards, Renee’s films started to fail and two years later she decided to get off the treadmill and turn to a therapist for help.
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She said: “He recognised I spent 99 per cent of my life as the public persona and just a microscopic crumb of a fraction in my real life.
“I needed to not have something to do all the time, to not know what I’m going to be doing for the next two years in advance.
“I wasn’t healthy. I wasn’t taking care of myself. I was the last thing on my list of priorities. You’re really unhealthy and unbalanced and, you know, about to die.”
Judy, who was married five times and had three children including the actresses Liza Minnelli and Lorna Luft, endured major struggles with her own mental health — leading her to attempt suicide more than 20 times.
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She was addicted to amphetamines that she had been given as a Hollywood starlet to keep her on her toes.
Unfortunately they kept her awake, sometimes for days on end, and she was hooked on them by the time she was 13.
Renee has also admitted to bouts of insomnia. She said: “I like to say that I’m a night owl who gets up early. You’ve got to get up to go to work sometimes at 4am, having gone to bed at 3am.
“I get busy at midnight. I used to move the furniture around or do laundry. I find laundry so satisfying because it brings some kind of order so I can feel right — fresh, starting over, in peace. I like my laundry.”
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The amphetamines also kept the 4ft 11in Judy thin, which was just how the studio bosses liked her.
Renee, who is 5ft 3in, has also been on the receiving end of endless speculation about her weight, particularly when she dramatically slimmed down after playing the cuddly Bridget.
But she has always dismissed any gossip, claiming her physique is the result of going to the gym.
Renee added: “When you read reports that you are starving yourself or that you are anorexic, it’s very unfair and disappointing.
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“It’s not very pleasant to read reports that say you’ve gone too far or this or that.”
In 2014, Renee appeared on the red carpet at an awards bash in Los Angeles, with a notably different face. It led many to speculate she’d had plastic surgery.
Confirming and denying nothing, she hit back: “I’m glad folks think I look different. I’m living a different, happy, more fulfilling life and I’m thrilled that perhaps it shows.
She added: “People don’t know me in my forties. People don’t know me as healthy for a while.
Renee Zellweger looks pretty in pink as she pays tribute to Judy Garland at 'Judy' premiere in London
“Perhaps I look different. Who doesn’t as they get older?”
Though Renee has not had to endure five failed marriages, she has had a string of doomed celebrity relationships.
She got engaged to Jim Carrey during a two-year relationship, which ended in 2000, and in 2002 she was swept off her feet by Jack White, lead singer of rock band The White Stripes.
Then in January 2005 she met Kenny Chesney and started the ultimate whirlwind romance. Their wedding was in May and the marriage was annulled five months later.
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The following year she met Bradley Cooper on the set of Case 39, though they are not thought to have started their relationship for another three years. They reportedly split because his career was just taking off at the same as hers was on the way down.
It started to look as if Renee’s personal life was emulating her unlucky-in-love alter ego, Bridget Jones.
But the first two hit adaptations — 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and 2004’s sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason — were by then a distant memory for Renee.
From 2008 to 2010 she released a film every six months and most bombed.
'SPECIAL PERSON'
It was an embarrassing wake-up call for a woman who had made her breakthrough opposite Tom Cruise in 1996’s Jerry Maguire and quickly became the toast of Tinsletown. After leaving the showbiz world behind in 2010, Renee travelled, studied and produced a show for TV.
In 2012 she also started a relationship with her current boyfriend, Eric Clapton’s former guitarist Doyle Bramhall II, describing him as “a special person”.
But the tumultuous split from his wife meant Renee was thrust back into the spotlight when court papers showed she was bankrolling him as he went through a painful and costly divorce.
Her other brief moment back in the public eye also proved troublesome, when she stopped short of condemning disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who she had personally thanked in her Oscar winner’s speech.
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The Miramax boss, now at the centre of a sex assault scandal, was a friend who made several of her movies.
She insists he never forced himself on her like other female stars. Renee said: “He was gruff and jocular and he made jokes about ‘looking hot in that skirt’. But it wasn’t threatening and it wasn’t demeaning.
“I knew that he was, in this really awkward, uncomfortable way, trying to give me a compliment. It never went further than that.
“It makes me very sad, personally sad. I’m sad for his family. I’m sad for the women that were hurt.
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“I’m sad for him. And I wish him healing so that he can somehow try to make reparations for the damage that he has done.”
Her comeback began when she made Bridget Jones’s Baby in 2016, followed by Netflix thriller What/If.
But it is Judy that could make Renee an Oscar contender once again.
The role sees her brilliantly tackle a woman who was once adored by millions during Hollywood’s golden age. Although she never won an Oscar, Judy was honoured with an Academy Juvenile Award and was twice nominated.
But by the Sixties, she had become a boozy, pill-popping singer forced to perform in Britain to pay for her children’s upkeep in the US and who owed thousands to the taxman.
The new film shows how the London trip ended in tragedy.
Judy died of an overdose of barbiturates at a mews house in Belgravia, following a run of shows in the capital.
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But unlike Judy, Renee knows how to bounce back after a dip in her career.
She said: “When it gets to be too much, when you learn that your skin is not quite as thick as you need it to be, what is that gonna feel like? Well, now I know.
“I got the hardest kick. And it ain’t the end.”
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