FEMALE moviegoers will delight in “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” in which Renee Zellweger plays a heroine with cellulite and flabby arms who triumphs over her neuroses to win the man of her dreams.
But if you really want to enjoy the movie’s empowering message, ignore the real-life Zellweger.
Much has been made of how “sporting” it was of Zellweger to biggie-size herself from a size 2 to 12 for her role as the thirtysomething singleton who first appeared in Helen Fielding’s comic novel.
But it’s only a movie.
Back in the real world, Zellweger immediately set about whittling herself down to toothpick size, showing off her reclaimed size 2 figure at the film’s premiere party in New York this week.
Apparently, she did not enjoy her brief flirtation with a normal-sized body.
Reports from the set have the 31-year-old actress wailing daily, “I’m so fat, I’m so fat!” and having to develop “a flat-footed walk as her thighs grew so big,” according to British Marie Claire.
“I didn’t look at my naked body in the shower, that’s for sure,” she told the magazine, adding that she gained the weight by eating – shock! – three meals a day.
Zellweger, who told an interviewer recently that she felt “really bloated” after eating some peanuts the night before, seems to have been sucked back into Tinseltown’s underfed-chic syndrome.
Like the rest of us, Zellweger’s a victim of Hollywood mandates: in her heavier times, Harper’s Bazaar ditched its plans to put the size 12 actress on the cover because she was deemed overweight.
Overweight? The average American woman is a size 12 to 14, and Bridget, who fluctuates between 129 and 138 pounds in the film, is scarcely obese. Whether she’s gallivanting about in leotards and fishnets or snuggling up in flannel pj’s, she looks healthy, curvaceous and sexy.
To most women, that’s a whole lot more normal than the “new and improved” Zellweger.
Even “Bridget’s” author, who also collaborated on the screenplay, points out that Zellweger at her heaviest was still thinner than her. “I never say how tall Bridget is in the book, so you don’t know how fat she is,” Fielding told The Post. “You know she’s not very fat, but you don’t know at all how much is in her head. That was deliberate, because in my experience most women think they’re fat even if they’re really thin, so that was the point.”
Fielding wishes Hollywood would get the hint. “I went to the Golden Globes and it’s the first time I’ve seen a group of actresses all in one room,” she says. “And they are a really different shape to everyone else. Yet we go to the movies and we look at them and we think that’s what we’re supposed to be like. It would be great if it started to be less a subject of remark, if an actress could just be a normal shape in a movie and it was considered normal.”
Wouldn’t it be nice?
