Renée Zellweger says her initial rise to fame irritated movie and marketing execs because she wasn’t considered enough of a classical “Hollywood Beauty.” “Look, I know I don’t have, and never have had, traditional movie-star looks,” Zellweger, 55, told the Telegraph in an interview Friday. “So something I kept hearing was, ‘How can we overcome this lack of movie-star-ness you embody?’ There would be a hair meeting, where they’d all say, ‘What are we going to do with this limp, fine hair? How are we going to make her look fabulous?’ And then a dress meeting, where it would be ‘She’s not voluptuous enough, so what are we going to do about that?’” Zellweger confessed that early on in her career, she even believed the way she looked was “prohibitive,” and that a “prettier girl deserved the job over me.” But the constant scrutiny, she explained, eventually helped fuel her performance as Bridget Jones, as she was able to channel the continuous nitpicking and anxieties into a career-defining role. “It was so liberating,” she said. “Because finally, here was a character who doesn’t get it right. She tries, but her make-up and hair are a mess, her outfits don’t quite come together properly. And for me, after 10 years of not measuring up, that was so freeing...Bridget wasn’t magazine-cover perfect. In fact, she had to not be.”
