Renee Zellweger

Renee Zellweger (born April 25, 1969) is an American actress and producer. She has won an Academy Award, three Golden Globe Awards and three Screen Actors Guild Awards and was named Hasty Pudding's Woman of the Year in 2009. She has established herself as one of the highest-paid Hollywood actresses in recent years. Zellweger first gained widespread attention for her role in the film Jerry Maguire (1996), and subsequently received two nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her roles as Bridget Jones in the comedy Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) and as Roxie Hart in the musical Chicago (2002), and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the drama Cold Mountain (2003). Her other films include Me, Myself and Irene (2000), Shark Tale (2004), Cinderella Man (2005), and Bee Movie (2007).

Renee Zellweger was born in Katy, Texas, a western suburb of Houston. Her father, Emil Erich Zellweger, is from Switzerland and is a mechanical and electrical engineer who worked in the oil refining business. Zellweger's mother, Kjellfried Irene, is a nurse and midwife who moved to the United States in order to work as a governess for a Norwegian family in Texas. Zellweger described herself as being raised in a family of "lazy Catholics and Episcopalians". She has an older brother, Andrew.

In junior high school, Zellweger actively took part in several sports, including soccer, basketball, baseball and football. She attended Katy High School, where she was a cheerleader, a gymnast, and a drama club member. Zellweger acted in several school plays and was voted the "Best Looking" of her class before graduating from high school in 1987. After high school, she went to the University of Texas at Austin to major in English language. Zellweger was a good student, and made the Dean's List several times. At the beginning she took a drama class only because she needed a fine arts credit to complete her degree, but the experience made her appreciate how much she loved acting. During this time, she supported herself by taking jobs as a waitress in Austin, Texas and worked maintenance at The Velvet Touch in Flint, Michigan. In 1991, Zellweger graduated with a BA degree in English. She considered moving to Hollywood but decided to stay in her home state, Texas, to seek more experience. Her first job after graduation was working in a beef commercial, at the same time she started to audition for roles around Houston

In 2002, Renee Zellweger bought a US$6.8-million home in Bel Air, then sold her previous home in the Hollywood Hills, bought for US$1.9M in 2000. Due to the constant attention from the paparazzi, she purchased a home in Connecticut and moved there in 2005. In January 2007, she admitted that she get's scared at home alone due to security problems and fans who send or leave mail at her homes; she said that she considered buying a gun for reasons of personal security. She claims she rarely spends time there, and keeps a small apartment in New York where she stops over to do laundry before moving on to her next film.