Renée Kathleen Zellweger (born April 25, 1969) is an American actress and producer. 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) (which she reprised in its sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004)), and as Roxie Hart in the musical Chicago (2002). She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the drama Cold Mountain (2003).
She has won three Golden Globe Awards and three Screen Actors Guild Awards, was named Hasty Pudding's Woman of the Year in 2009, and established herself as one of the highest-paid Hollywood actresses as of 2007.
Zellweger was born in Katy, Texas, a western suburb of Houston. Her father, Emil Erich Zellweger, is from Au, St. Gallen in Switzerland, and is a mechanical and electrical engineer who worked in the oil refining business.Her mother, Kjellfrid Irene (née Andreassen), is Norwegian-born and of Sami origin, and 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 has 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, a member of speech team, and a drama club member. Zellweger acted in several school plays and was voted the "Dream Date" 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 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.
She said in 2009 she earned her Screen Actors Guild card doing a Coors Light beer commercial while in college.Also while in college, she did "a bit part ... as a local hire" in the Austin-filmed horror-comedy My Boyfriend's Back, playing "the girl in the beauty shop, maybe two lines. But the beauty shop got cut."In 1991, Zellweger graduated from college with a BA degree in English. She considered moving to Hollywood but stayed in 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