Before Bridget Jones shot Ren\u00e9e Zellweger to global stardom, the Texan had made her screen debut in a handful of low-budget indies. She followed those up with small parts in \u201990s classics Dazed and Confused, Reality Bites, and Empire Records, after which Jerry Maguire made her America\u2019s sweetheart.<\/p>\n
More success followed: Me, Myself & Irene, alongside Jim Carrey, who became her partner in the late \u201990s; and Nurse Betty, the pitch-black comedy which earned her a Golden Globe for best actress in a musical or comedy. But the Helen Fielding adaptation about the ultimate Frazzled Englishwoman marked a point of no return: after that came Oscar glory for 2003\u2019s Cold Mountain, and her anointing as a Hollywood fixture.<\/p>\n
To celebrate Zellweger\u2019s 57th birthday today, we\u2019re taking a look back at the earliest years of her career via the best vintage photos from the \u201990s and early aughts. Think minimalist slips, naked dressing, and a few CBK-inspired staples.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before Bridget Jones shot Ren\u00e9e Zellweger to global stardom, the Texan had made her screen debut in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":416970,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,10699,93,61,60,132473],"class_list":["post-416969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-digital_syndication","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-storytypedeep-dive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/416970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}