BRIDGET JONES GOES OVER THE RAINBOW
Renee Zellweger steps into Judy Garland’s shoes
Renee Zellweger calls her new film Judy, “a celebration of a woman who was not just iconic, but heroic. I fell more deeply in love with Judy Garland the more I learned about her”.
After the film’s premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Zellweger received a standing ovation that lasted long enough to prompt her to say, through a veil of happy tears: “OK, quit it! You’re messing up my make-up!”
Even before the film’s release, Judy already has sparked talk of an Oscar nomination as Best Actress and about a Zellweger comeback — all of which, she said, “is just an extension of the blessing of this movie”.
“It also means that I get to hang out with my friends from this film a bit more,” she added. “It’s always sad when you’re actually finished with a project you love and leave to go off to other things. It’s nice to meet up to celebrate a film and have a laugh with your friends.”
So why Judy Garland, and why now? According to Zellweger, the answer to the second question is “now and any time”.
“She is arguably the greatest entertainer who ever lived,” the actress said. “She meant so much to so many people. And she had that gorgeous, gorgeous voice where she just poured out her entire heart into her songs.
“There was a reason why this woman was a legend and we’re still talking about her all these years later.”
Don’t expect to see Zellweger on-screen skipping down a yellow brick road in a blue-calico dress. Due for release in Thailand on Thursday,
Judy, directed by Rupert Goold, focuses on Garland circa 1968. It’s almost 30 years after The Wizard Of Oz (1939), and Garland’s life is a long way from any rainbows.
As she arrived in swinging London for a five-week, sold-out run at a nightclub called The Talk Of The Town, Garland was 46, broke, embroiled in a custody fight over her children and in increasingly poor health.
Her money issues were paramount. She owed US$4 million in back taxes to Uncle Sam and needed to provide a home for her kids if she wanted to retain custody. She was washed up in the movies and haunted by memories of a childhood lost to Hollywood.
But Judy Garland wasn’t down for the count. Not yet. She still had the pipes to dazzle audiences, and even embarked on a romantic relationship with nightclub manager Mickey Deans (Finn Wittrock), who was to become her fifth and final husband.
“Her resistance was remarkable,” Zellweger said. “Her career was one part of her life. I wanted to look into the human side of this icon … It was terrifying and wonderful, but I was so in love with her and thought of this film as a huge celebration of her.”
She admitted to feeling considerable pressure to get the story right, pressure that comes with playing a real-life legend who is still very much with us in her recordings, films and television shows.
“It’s a different sense of responsibility that you feel,” Zellweger said. “You want to represent things as accurately as you can by digging through the historical and public record of the legacy of Judy’s life. In reading those things and considering the source, I learned a little bit about the difference between the person’s true history and the public account, and tried to find the balance in between.”
Zellweger was no stranger to Garland or her work — “I fell in love with Judy Garland when I was a girl,” she said — but she knew that she’d have to buckle down to play her on screen, especially since she was going to be doing her own singing. Zellweger had acquitted herself well singing and dancing in Chicago (2002), even earning an Oscar nomination as Best Actress, but that’s not the same as playing one of the most iconic singers ever to record.
A year before filming began, Zellweger started working with a vocal coach on the songs for the film. She also spent four months rehearsing with musical director Matt Dunkley, trying to capture Garland’s trademark stage presence.
“I couldn’t sing those songs, initially, because I didn’t have the strength to do it,” the actress admitted. “My stomach just flipped every single time I had to sing. To practice, I would sit in my car singing Judy, knowing that I would soon be doing that in front of an audience on set.”
A pivotal scene in the movie has her singing Garland’s signature tune, Somewhere Over The Rainbow.
“It was uncanny,” Goold said in a separate interview. “I’ll always remember Renee singing Rainbow unaccompanied. Everyone was spellbound. I’d look at Renee across the set and think she had become Judy Garland.”
She didn’t have to sing there — most movie performances are recorded in studios, and the singers lip-sync during filming — but Zellweger insisted that she must.
“Singing in front of everyone on set was so key,” she explained, “because it was important to capture that magical bond between Judy and her audience. It was interactive. All I could do was think about what the songs meant to her at that point in her life.”
On the Judy soundtrack, Zellweger sings two duets, joining Sam Smith for
Get Happy and Rufus Wainwright for
Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.
In the film, Garland worries that audiences have forgotten her — ironic in that, since her death at 47 on June 22, 1969, from a drug overdose, she has been a constant cultural presence. That is especially poignant to Zellweger.
“I’m sad to say that I took her for granted, like a lot of people you love in your life,” she explained. “She was just always there. I wonder if she knew how much of an impact she had on people’s lives and how much love and affection
the fans truly had for her? There is a reason why we’re telling her story so many years after her passing. It’s not just her talent. She was humility, grace and empathy.
“She was quite rare.” Zellweger grew up in Katy, Texas, where her father worked in the oil-refining business as a mechanical and electrical engineer and her mother was a nurse and midwife. She joined the drama club in high school, and later studied drama at the University of Texas at Austin, graduating with a degree in English.
Zellweger began her movie career with bit parts in Dazed And Confused
(1993), Reality Bites (1994), Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994), Love And A .45 (1994) and
Empire Records (1995).
She broke through, however, playing a single mom in love with a sports agent (Tom Cruise) in Jerry Maguire (1996), and launched a rare non-action-movie franchise playing the beloved, befuddled London “singleton” Bridget Jones in Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), Bridget
Jones: The Edge Of Reason (2004) and Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016). Those were both sweet characters, but Zellweger’s Oscar as Best Supporting Actress came for her performance as hard-nosed Ruby Thewes in Cold
Mountain (2003) and, while she was nominated as Best Actress for Bridget
Jones’s Diary, she also was nominated for playing a fame-hungry murderess in Chicago. In other words, she doesn’t have to play “nice” characters.
“I’ve played some not-so-nice, notso-shy, unmannered women,” she said. “I’ve even played some nasty, horrible women. Some didn’t have a finely tuned moral compass, and that can be fun to play too.”
Recently Zellweger starred in the first season of the Netflix anthology series
What/If, a morality tale about the ripple effect of a single decision. She signed on, the actress said, to work with series creator Mike Kelley, best known for
Revenge (2011-2015).
“We’re exploring choices, consequences and how we compromise ourselves ethically because of fear or how we want to be loved,” she said. “It’s such an outrageous character, which is so much fun.”
The show was Zellweger’s return to acting after a couple of years off — hence the film’s being hailed as a comeback.
“I’ve been making films for over 20 years now,” she said. “Good God! I think time off is good, because you also need the in-between moments. You learn self-reliance and how to create boundaries between your life and work.”
One more question: Any chance that someday moviegoers will be watching a biopic called Renee?
“That would be so boring,” Zellweger scoffed with a laugh.
There is a reason why we’re telling her story so many years after her passing