Renée Zellweger Says No One Recognises Her Anymore

Renée Zellweger has revealed that her absence from the big screen means that she isn’t recognised in the street anymore.

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“When you go away and you’re out of people’s consciousness, they stop noticing you. It’s fantastic, you order your coffee and you get a coffee and leave,” she told Jonathan Ross.

“It’s really nice because I’d meet people authentically, you’d have authentic conversations on the street and I enjoyed that, that’s something that I had missed.”

After a flurry of major Hollywood roles in the late 90s through to the mid-2000s, she stepped back from the spotlight, appearing in only a handful of movies.

Of the decision, she said: “There were a lot of things, mainly I just wanted to shift my focus a little bit and keep some promises that I had made to myself a long time ago. There are some things that I wanted to learn and see if I had aptitude for.

“I wanted to go back to school I wanted to do things that you can’t really make time for when you’re in the cycle of making films because if you’re not preparing for one, then you’re preparing for another and while you’re filming you’ll be getting ready to start what comes next.

“I had to just commit to breaking that cycle for a little bit so that I could grow as a person. I was boring myself, you know. I’m really lucky with the people that I work with, we are like-minded but it was time.”

She was on Ross’s ITV show, airing on Saturday night, doing the press rounds for new movie ‘Bridget Jones’s Baby’, which is currently riding on a rather rare 100% ‘fresh’ approval rating on reviews aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.

The movie is out on September 16 across the UK.

Image credits: Getty/Rex Features/Universal