Toronto Star lifestyle reporter Judy Gerstel was praising the actress’ staying power: “In a business that regards lovely young things as a raw, renewable resource—witness Alicia Silverstone and Liv Tyler of recent memory—Zellweger is here to stay.” But by March, Gerstel had replaced Zellweger with another young blonde: Hope Davis, she wrote, was “This year's Renée Zellweger.” Wasn’t Renée Zellweger supposed to be that year’s Renée Zellweger? “It Girl” is both a welcome and a warning shot.
Actresses who receive the label are said to possess an ineffable quality that defies the vocabulary of even the most competent critics. Gerstel pegged Zellweger as a “beguiling concoction of wholesomeness, ingenuousness, vulnerability and sensuality.” And in her review of Jerry Maguire, New York Times critic Janet Maslin praised Zellweger’s “open, eager, unconventionally pretty face,” and noted that her “fetching ordinariness” was somehow “quite extraordinary.” The word these writers were searching for was young.
When the now-45-year-old Zellweger appeared at Elle’s Women in Hollywood awards Monday night, she earned a new set of mysterious qualifiers: “utterly unrecognizable,” “drastically different,” and “suspiciously puffy,” the Daily Mail said. Zellweger’s transformation was so alarmingly obvious that Gawker covered the event by simply publishing a gallery of Zellweger shots, each accompanied by the incredulous caption, “Here's a picture of Renée Zellweger,”
