Renee Zellweger

Renée Zellweger is an American actress whose three-decade career has produced multiple defining American film roles, including three Best Actress Academy Award nominations and two Academy Award wins (Best Supporting Actress 2004 for Cold Mountain; Best Actress 2020 for Judy). She was born Renée Kathleen Zellweger on April 25, 1969, in Katy, Texas. Her father Emil Erich Zellweger was a Swiss-American mechanical engineer who had emigrated from Switzerland in 1955, and her mother Kjellfrid Irene Andreassen was a Norwegian-American nurse. She attended the University of Texas at Austin (B.A. in English, 1991).

Her film breakthrough came in Cameron Crowe's Jerry Maguire (1996, opposite Tom Cruise) — the film whose line "You had me at hello" has been continuously cited as one of the defining American romantic-film lines of the 1990s. Her 2000s peak roles produced three consecutive Best Actress Academy Award nominations — Bridget Jones's Diary (2001, in which she played Bridget Jones opposite Hugh Grant and Colin Firth), Chicago (2002, the Rob Marshall musical adaptation), and Cold Mountain (2003, for which she won the 2004 Best Supporting Actress Academy Award).

Her Bridget Jones franchise has continued through three sequels — Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), Bridget Jones's Baby (2016), and Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2025). The Bridget Jones franchise has been continuously cited as one of the leading American-British romantic-comedy franchises of the 21st century.

Her 2020 Best Actress Academy Award came for Rupert Goold's Judy (2019) — in which she played Judy Garland during her 1968 London concert series at the Talk of the Town. The Garland portrayal — including Zellweger's own singing of the Judy Garland songbook — has been continuously cited as one of the transformative American screen-acting performances of the late 2010s. She has been with American TV personality Ant Anstead since 2021.

Her name Renée is the French feminine form of the Latin Renatus meaning "reborn." Renée was a popular American girls' name through the 1960s and 1970s.