On February 28, 1995, the Independent newspaper published an anonymous column about a fictional single woman in her thirties living in London, under the heading ‘The Diary of Bridget Jones’. Its author, eventually revealed to be Helen Fielding, expected the column to be axed after a couple of weeks. “I didn’t tell any of my colleagues it was me who was writing Bridget,” Fielding said in 2016. “I was working alongside a lot of very clever, seasoned journalists who were writing about New Labour and Chechnya, and I felt stupid writing about calories and alcohol units, and why it takes three hours between waking up and leaving the house in the morning.”
How wrong she was. A true pop cultural phenomenon had been born. The column ran for two years, spinning off into three multi-million selling books, three movies that grossed over $750m worldwide, and transformed the careers of its stars Renee Zellweger, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth.Now, exactly 30 years on from that first fledgling column, a fourth Bridget Jones movie is about to hit our screens.
‘Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy’ is an adaptation of the third book of the same title (rather confusingly, the third movie, Bridget Jones’ Baby, didn’t use the third book as source material). The plot sees Bridget, now living as a wealthy, 50-something widow and mother of two young children. Yes, Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), alas, is dead, and the movie picks up four years after his death, as Bridget emerges from her grief to potentially find love again.
As Bridget says to herself in the trailer: “Bridget Jones: it’s time to live.” The prospective love interests this time round are one of her kids’ teachers (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and a younger cheeky chappy (played by the world’s favourite young cheeky chappy Leo Woodall, from White Lotus and One Day).
For Zellweger, returning to the role almost 25 years after she was first cast as Bridget (to a lot of controversy at the time), feels like “having a reunion with a friend.”
“It sounds a little strange to have a friendship with a film character, but that’s what it feels like,” Zellweger says “The world has changed so much in the nearly 25 years since we began the journey. It’s such an interesting thing for a fictional character to move through life at the same pace as the folks who relate to her and love her. “It’s an incredible thing to see how everyone has grown and changed, and to tell the story from a new and different perspective.”
Landing the role of Bridget was career-making for Zellweger. In 2001, when the first movie came out, she was slowly capitalising on the success of her breakout performance in ‘Jerry Maguire’ (1996). Almost every British actress was considered for the role of Bridget (Kate Winslet, Rachel Weisz and Emily Watson among them). So when the Texas-born Zellweger was cast, many doubted that she could pull off the accent as well as the look and feel of a quintessential British woman. Zellweger proved them all wrong. She earned rave reviews for her performance, landing an Oscar nomination for Best Actress (losing to Halle Berry for ‘Monster’s Ball’) – a rare and highly deserved romcom acting nomination. The movie propelled Zellweger to the top of Hollywood’s A-list, next starring in ‘Chicago’ (2002) and her first Oscar winning performance in ‘Cold Mountain’ (2003). She returned as Bridget in the 2004 sequel ‘The Edge of Reason’, which, to be fair, is still an enjoyable watch, even if it’s not a patch on the original. But 12 long years passed before the third Bridget movie came along in 2016, in which time Zellweger took a long hiatus from acting. Returning to Bridget gave Zellweger’s career a new heft all over again; a few years later she went on to win her second Oscar for playing a late-era Judy Garland in ‘Judy’.
Of course, Zellweger wasn’t the only magic ingredient that made the movies so spectacularly. With a basic structure taken from Jane Austen’s ‘Pride & Prejudice’ (common to just about every romcom ever made), the story was elevated by the love triangle between Bridget and two very different men: Firth’s hot but stuffy Mark Darcy and Hugh Grant’s sexy bad boy Daniel Cleaver. Both actors clearly relished the chance to play with their screen personas. Firth, winking at his Mr Darcy fame from the legendary 1995 BBC Austen adaptation, but especially Grant, ripping into his first opportunity to show a darker, edgier side from the stuttering, floppy-haired good guy we’d grown to love from ‘Four Weddings And A Funeral’ and ‘Notting Hill’.
So what’s next in the Bridget Jones Cinematic Universe, you might wonder? No doubt, there will soon be calls for a 5th Bridget movie or maybe even a TV series? Maybe a new book? Lily Allen’s stage musical adaptation has been in limbo for many years now, but maybe that will get a new lease of life?
For now, though, hopes are again extremely high for the fourth movie, with the cast and crew confident that an older, somewhat wiser Bridget can once again tap into the zeitgeist.
Words – Declan Cashin
BRIDGET JONES: MAD ABOUT THE BOY is at cinemas from Feb 13th