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Renée Zellweger stands five feet five (in shoes, on her tiptoes) and weighs 106 pounds (including her copious golden hair) soaking wet. These are generous estimates, since Zellweger is almost elfin, a borderline wee person. She is lean, fit, absurdly youthful, and when wearing jeans, a T-shirt, sneakers, and no makeup—which is to say, virtually all the time—she looks like the accessible but unattainable comp-lit major about whom every guy in her study group will write a tortured sonnet. In fact, Zellweger is 31. Although her face has a cherubic quality on film, that is an illusion. She's about as zaftig as a Romanian gymnast.

And now for her typical daily "diet." Breakfast: cheese omelette with sausage or bacon, two slices of toast with a tablespoon of butter, one grapefruit, tea with whole milk. Midmorning snack: chocolate milk shake (large), with protein powder. Lunch: one pizza (large), salad with extra dressing, cheesecake, whole milk. Afternoon snack: chocolate candy bar. Dinner: whole roasted chicken, mashed potatoes with butter, sauteed carrots with butter, pint of Guinness, creme caramel. Bedtime snack: fruit pie, ice cream, water (two liters).

There's a certain dramatic tension here, and not just because every woman in America would, after reading this list, seem to have ample reason to curse Renee Zellweger. That would be unfair. Zellweger, generally a healthy eater, is gorging like a longshoreman because she desperately needs to gain weight—to, in her words, "pack it on and pork it up." She is Method Eating. Within weeks, she has to add a dozen pounds in order to play the title character in Bridget Jones's Diary, based on Helen Fielding's recent comic novel about the travails of being single, weight-conscious, and British. Sample diary entry: "calories 3241 (bad but burnt off by stairs)." "I think I'm the only actress in Hollywood who has weight-gain powder on her kitchen counter," Zellweger says. That the Active Bridget Jones spends most of her time obsessing about how to lose a dozen pounds is ironic but incidental. Like her, Zellweger is, at least for the time being, distracted by "body issues."

Besides which, Zellweger, trim though she is, is no stranger to Bridget's neurosis. "I'm an actor," she says, almost apologetically, as she surveys the fashionable London neighborhood of Kensington which has become her temporary home. "And so you do worry. It's part of the job, I guess. But it has been a lot of work. I mean, I'm so put off food. You think, O.K., you can eat whatever you want! And as much as you want! Whoo-hoo! But I cannot. I was repulsed walking down the Easter-candy aisle at the market the other day. I can't think of eating another chocolate bar or pizza, butter, or dessert. It all sounds disgusting to me now because I have to eat so much of it."

And so it is with good humor but precious little joy that Zellweger now spends her days in a state of constant consumption. "Beer. I don't even like beer, but today we're definitely gonna be drinkin' some Guinness," she says. She's Texan, born and bred in exurban Houston, and sometimes she drops her g's. Which raises another issue: she also has to gain and solidify an accent—specifically, a British accent which could be described as vaguely Sloane Square-ish. This makes her a self-possessed Texan with no problems attracting men playing a self-hating Englishwoman who most certainly does. This contrast has prompted a minor brawl in the British press—they love to dismiss her as "the Texan comic"—but more on that later.

"Plus," she adds, "I really miss my dog, Dylan. This is the first time we've been separated, because you can't bring a dog into England [due to customs rules designed to keep rabies out of the country]. And I can't really exercise, which I usually do every day. Can't run or anything, and that kind of screws me up a little. Makes me feel sluggish." She stops and tugs on her baggy jeans—her "fat jeans," as she calls them—which she's having trouble keeping above her hips. "I'm supposed to fill out these things, and my, uh"—she points to her bum, as they say— "seems to be growing a bit. But I still can't fill these things out. I've got time, though. There's work to be done!" She breaks out into her signature laugh, a robust Texan joy-cry much larger than her stature. "Hungry?" she asks gamely. "Time for another feeding." She settles on a small Italian place where she has spent a considerable amount of time and effort. The waiters know her well. She's every waiter's dream—a bighearted, big-tipping blonde with the appetite of the Mexican pitcher Fernando Valenzuela. "Beer?" asks one of them. "Pasta? Bread?"

"Yes!" Zellweger replies brightly.

DREAM GIRL "She's a girl I would meet in a mall in Texas," thought Chris Rock, until he discovered Zellweger's sense of humor. "There are so few girls who can run with a joke."

She is the height of informality. Tomorrow she will spend the afternoon at the Laundromat, chatting with American college students and folding T-shirts. She doesn't hesitate to pick stray bits of food off your chin. She surveys the menu and says, "We'll get some chocolate ice cream, too, but we can do that later."

These are strange days for the actress who, hard on the heels of Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock, seems destined to inherit that double-edged Hollywood title: America's Sweetheart. She's now in the $3to-$5-million-per-picture range, and she's starring in two of this year's most anticipated movies, one of which is Nurse Betty, directed by Neil LaBute, creator of the assiduously controversial sexual comedies In the Company of Men (1997) and Your Friends & Neighbors (1998). In LaBute's new film, Zellweger plays a soap-opera-addicted waitress who, after seeing her no-account husband murdered by two unlikely bandits (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock), goes mental. There's a pattern here, given that Zellweger's other, more visible project is Me, Myself & Irene, a sort of schizophrenia comedy by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, the bawdy brothers whose oeuvre includes There's Something About Mary and Dumb & Dumber—two of the funniest movies ever made. Zellweger plays Irene, who falls for a man who, after his no-account wife leaves him for a dwarf, goes mental.

Me, Myself & Irene will almost certainly be a hit, in part because it co-stars Jim Carrey, who fell for Zellweger on-screen and off. After some drama, they became a couple, and that fact certainly has a kind of happy strangeness to it. Nevertheless, it has become the source of some discomfort for Zellweger and Carrey, two uncommonly private figures who have recoiled from all media inquiries about their relationship. There have been cruel newspaper items (The Daily Telegraph accused her of gossiping about "Cameron Diaz's split ends"), and she has been stung by them. Couple this with erroneous reports that Helen Fielding had opposed casting Zellweger as Bridget Jones and the oddness thickens. Then came the coup de grace: in the midst of Bridgetgate, in order to prep for the role, Zellweger worked in the dark heart of the British publishing industry itself, at the venerable British firm of Picador. There, one of her primary duties was to serve as a kind of liaison to—and this is really quite sick—the London tabloids which were routinely ridiculing her. "Absolutely strange," Zellweger says. "This part kind of sucks, actually. Having to go through and read every single thing they write about you. Without crying."

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'I saw her work in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, " says Zellweger's friend and Nurse Betty co-star, Chris Rock, "and it really spoke to me."

As usual, Rock has boiled the situation down to its essence—in this case, the fact that nobody knew who the hell Zellweger was until 1996, when, virtually out of nowhere, she winningly co-starred as Tom Cruise's fumbling gal Friday in Jerry Maguire. True, Zellweger had already completed one genuine lead role, opposite Vincent D'Onofrio, in a charming indie film called The Wit ole Wide World, a love story about a pulp-fiction writer and his girlfriend, but virtually no one saw that. Until Jerry Maguire she'd been your typical actress/waitress, slinging drinks at Chili's and trolling for acting jobs in Austin. A good friend was equally impoverished fellow University of Texas alumnus Matthew McConaughey, who ultimately became her co-star in what Rock calls "TCM4." (Later, in Richard Linklater's 1993 Texas-stoner epic, Dazed and Confused, McConaughey was the pathetic Wooderson, who kept hanging around high-school chicks because "I get older, they stay the same age," while she was the perky blonde sitting on the hood of a car.) She made a commercial for the beef industry—tug-of-war on the beach!—and played yet another dialogue-deprived tart in 1994's Reality Bites.

Movies had little to do with her youth. "I'm so ignorant about film," she says, pointing out that her parents, Emil and Irene, are Swiss and Norwegian, respectively. "They didn't grow up in cultures that celebrated that medium.... My mom would drop us off occasionally to see Pippi Longstocking or Escape to Witch Mountain.... But after I was nine and we moved further out into the country"—to tiny Katy, Texas—"we only saw one movie as a family until Jerry Maguire, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I was so young, I had no idea what was going on."

The official story has always had it that while auditioning for the role in Jerry Maguire (which had been coveted by such established stars as Winona Ryder and Bridget Fonda), Zellweger, bursting with good-ol'-gal Texas moxie, was so fearless that when director Cameron Crowe finally offered her the job, she replied, "What makes you think I want it?"

She said that, but, as usual, the official story is not the same as the whole story. Yes, Crowe confirms, Zellweger did appear to be unfazed by the fact that, despite a resume whose highlights included bit roles and slasher films, she was now going head-to-head with the biggest star in Hollywood. "Cameron and I just flipped for her when she came in," says Cruise. "She was willing to try just about anything."

"Jim was in love with her and she wasn't responding... He was a whippd puppy dog."

"She had her polished shield of Renéeness," Crowe recalls. "I was just watching the tape of her early rehearsals. She had this carefree spirit that masked a beautifully driven actress. I've directed just long enough to see [new talents] fold, too. Sometimes they just fold like a deck of cards. I asked Billy Wilder about this and he said it happens 9 times out of 10." Zellweger, unlike most greenhorns, never seemed to flinch, even after the 19th take with the famously demanding Cruise. "What you tend to see," Crowe continues, "is that it gets really hard on them. They'll say, 'I've got a family!' or 'I've got a boyfriend and I don't need this shit!' But Renee would just say, 'Hey, no problem.'"

Inside, it can now be revealed, Zellweger was a quivering pile of gelatin. "I was scared because I was sure that any day I was going to get fired. Like, any day," she admits. It's not paranoia if it's true. Crowe says that some studio executives, itching for a big-name costar, were quietly lobbying against the new kid. And she didn't help matters when, after her beloved Dylan fell ill, she put in an uncommonly lackluster rehearsal session. "I never believed I had the role until the day that the movie came out," Zellweger says.

At this point, Zellweger was still in pre-celebrity mode, living in a little house in L.A.'s Laurel Canyon. In 1996, when Jerry Maguire opened to rave reviews and $270 million in business, she was on the East Coast, making the small indie film A Price Above Rubies, in which she played what will forever be the unlikeliest character of her career: a Hasidic housewife.

"A bunch of the cast [of Jerry Maguire] was getting together for the premiere [in Los Angeles]," Crowe recalls. "And we'd say, 'Wait—where's Renee?' She was being shy and she didn't want to ask anyone to fly her out, because she was doing a lowbudget film on the East Coast." Zellweger was the only featured cast member who wasn't at the premiere—a fact that she now finds slightly mortifying.

The next couple of years were a mixed bag, largely because Zellweger had unusual considerations when deciding which roles to take. She rejected several simply because it wasn't practical for her to bring Dylan to the set. (This, by the way, is not a publicist's concoction: if Zellweger's 11-year-old mutt asked her for back-end points and his own trailer, he'd get them. Stand-up comic Pete Dominick, who was a production assistant on A Price Above Rubies, recalls Dylan spent most of the filming right under the camera, waiting for the director to yell "cut.") And, more often than not, she was content to take it easy and to lead a quiet existence with her boyfriend of a few years, independent filmmaker Josh Pate, who directed her in a 1998 noir mystery called Deceiver.

Neil LaBute's two previous dark comedies, In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, were as willfully scabrous as they come. In fact, after Zellweger saw In the Company of Men, about two bored wage apes who psychologically torture a lonely, deaf typist, she was "really pissed off," she recalls. "Just angry. I walked out and went, 'En garde!' I saw it with a girlfriend. We both said, 'Grrr ... God, I hate that movie! But no. I don't really hate the film.' I guess I felt like he wanted me to feel, and that probably means that it was a successful movie." She adds, "It's interesting when you meet the guy. You met Neil before? He's not who you might think he is_He's a sweet person. Really nice person to be around. He's got a really edgy, interesting sense of humor."

Over a pizza, LaBute gently persuaded her to play the title character in Nurse Betty—a frowsy Kansas waitress who, after her husband (Aaron Eckhart) is butchered, develops an irrational attachment to her favorite soap-opera star, played by Greg Kinnear, and sets off to find him in Hollywood. "I don't know what Renee means in terms of box office," says LaBute, who has seen little of it himself. "But she embodies [Betty], and there's no artificial sweetness." Betty is a first for Zellweger in that she's playing a serious mental case, and also for LaBute, who has finally created a sympathetic female lead. "I tried to pull a little surprise and go another way," the director says.

No doubt one of the more compelling things about Nuise Betty is that it spawned one of the unlikelier friendships in recent memory—between Zellweger, the modest southern gal, and Chris Rock, the immodest Brooklyn guy. On first glance, Rock says, he thought, "She's a girl I would meet in a mall in Texas. She seemed way too normal. You can be too normal in Los Angeles, and she's too normal." After a while, though, Rock discovered that he didn't have to censor himself around her. "I dabble in comedy," he says, "and there are so few girls who can run with a joke. There are about four, and I haven't met the other three."

As filming on Nurse Betty wound down in the spring of 1999, so too did Zellweger's romance with Josh Pate. She briefly found herself in Rome, filming a small but critical scene; on her way back home, her flight stopped at London's Heathrow Airport. She'll tell you the rest: "I was about to go home and cry on my pillow about the ending of a relationship." Gallows laugh. "But I just got off the plane and called my friend who lives in London and said, 'Guess what I've done.' And he said, 'Good!' So he and three of his best male friends, four gorgeous men—it's good for a girl to run around with three gorgeous Englishmen and a Brazilian—kidnapped me and surprised me and took me to the mountains in Switzerland, where my father is from, because I'd always wanted to see it. We took a horse sleigh up to an inn at the top of a mountain to have dinner. God, it was amazing. They took me to a place where I can't leave ... because we're in the middle of nowhere. Even if I'd wanted to call, I couldn't—that's one of those girl things that we tend to do, you know."

Thwack. She slaps both hands over her face. She is pink. She has a tendency, when nervous or mortified, to speak and laugh simultaneously.

"So then I get this fax that says, 'You need to read this [the script of Me, Myself & Irene] right away!' I said, 'I'll read it, but I don't feel the need to go to work right away.' They faxed me a page at a time, and the machine kept running out of paper. I couldn't stop laughing; it was hysterical. Most of the time when you read a script, you go, 'Hmmmmm—nahhh.' I brought it to breakfast the next day and said to my friends, 'O.K., it's got a lot to do with a dild—"

Thwack. Again, a monument to pinkness, she covers her face. "I can't say that word," she says, dissolving.

The magic word is "dildo," and along with defecating civil servants and adult-on-adult breast-feeding, the rubbery sexual totem indeed plays a pivotal role in Me, Myself & Irene, which doe-eyed, conservative Zellweger jumped at despite the fact that "I'm hugely embarrassed when it comes to scatological matters, and I'm very shy about my sexuality, I suppose. Like in A Price Above Rubies, there's this virtual rape scene. It was really difficult to do."

Suddenly she clicks into Chris Rock mode. "Yeah—the tone [of that movie] is a bit confused. I mean, it's very funny until the rape scene. " An explosion of laughter. "Hysterical, actually." She downshifts. "To play someone who's very open with her sexuality is always a challenge to me—to pretend like I'm not embarrassed.... Seriously, it's a very embarrassing thing.... There are close-ups [in Me, Myself & Irene] of Jim and me having sex. I mean, Whoooo!" When told that the close-ups didn't make the final cut, Zellweger is euphoric. Still, she says, "If my dad saw it, I'd be terribly embarrassed, and I ain't gonna see it with him."

Zellweger was cast after Carrey signed on. Carrey, who had starred with Jeff Daniels in the Farrellys' 1994 hit Dumb & Dumber, was asked if Zellweger would be a satisfactory choice. "He lit up," recalls Peter Farrelly. "Just as he did with Jeff Daniels, because he knew they could both hold their own against him. Which, believe me, is not easy." At another point, Farrelly explicates the fear factor engendered by Carrey: "He's intimidating because you respect him so much. There are only two guys who intimidate me—him and Bill Murray. But Jim's more down-to-earth. He loves to act, but then he sits down and reads a book. Bill Murray is always on, which is really scary. You don't want to make eye contact a lot with Bill."

The movie was filmed in the Farrellys' hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, and in and around idyllic Burlington, Vermont, where the cast and crew lived like kings, spending happy hour at a local seafood restaurant, gorging on shellfish and beer. They played golf, mingled with Peter and Bobby Farrelly's endless stream of friends and relatives, and hung out with the town's only indigenous celebrities, the rock band Phish. Carrey would often spend the weekends tooling around on his motorcycle; Zellweger, the set's unofficial den mother, would jog and rally the troops for weekend activities. This being a Farrelly brothers project, high jinks were commonplace. While filming a brief scene in which Irene looks out the window, Zellweger opened a curtain and found three sets of large white buttocks smiling back at her. "I identified them, as best I could, as Pete's, Bob's, and [the guy] who runs the video," she recalls. "I won't tell you how."

Carrey plays Charlie and Hank, a schizophrenic cop and his alter ego, whose dueling personalities fall for Zellweger's Irene while escorting her to New York to answer an arrest warrant. Before filming, Carrey and Zellweger knew each other only barely. "I met Jim a couple years ago, at a mutual friend's at dinner," she says, choosing her words carefully, since neither she nor Carrey has said much about the other in public. "And I'd known him, or of him, and knew what he was doing in his life."

So, she is asked, you're single in Vermont, on romantic Lake Champlain, with perhaps the other biggest male star in Hollywood, and ...

"How do you mean?" she replies.

You know; you're stuck out there in Vermont—the perfect place to, you know ...

"Oh," she says, staring down at her plate. She hates this part, and, frankly, who could blame her? This part is, for all involved, a study in pure journalistic horribleness. "I didn't start going out with him there."

"You didn't?"

"No."

"Why wouldn't you?"

"Mmmm. Because it's—"

"It's the perfect place."

"Yeah. I guess so. I guess that's right." Pink again. Still, she's made a point: tabloid reports about that period were over-baked. "He became a really ... He became very important to me as a friend. I mean, we had some fun together."

Later, Peter Farrelly cheerfully offers his version: "About halfway through the movie, Jim was in love with her and she wasn't responding. He was glum. He was a whipped puppy dog. By the end, he was an emotional wreck. He was head over heels and giving it everything. It was very tough on her. She has something about on-set relationships, and she was true to that." But cinematically speaking, says Farrelly, "it was a great thing when he was getting his heart ripped out, because Charlie is frustrated that she's going back and forth between these two guys. There was some truth to it."

It all ended well, in that Carrey and Zellweger are now together. Nevertheless, Carrey pulled out of an interview with V.F., saying through a publicist that he wants to avoid the whole subject. Days later, though, the fax machine spit out this bombshell, via his PR. firm: "Renee shines. She's able to leave herself completely vulnerable in her work, and yet within her there is an undeniable strength and luminosity. She has tremendous integrity, but she's not afraid to make fun of herself."

"I'm hugely embarrassed when it comes to scatological matters, and I'm very shy about my sexuality."

Have we mentioned that, at various points during the interviews for this article, Zellweger has been speaking with a British accent? Like Madonna, but with a valid reason. Zellweger's dialogue coach, Barbara Berkery, has encouraged her to stay "in accent" as the filming of Bridget Jones's Diary looms. It makes sense, especially since Zellweger spent weeks last spring working as if she actually were Bridget, the neurotic, self-deprecating publishing flunky who made Helen Fielding's novel a kind of female bookend to Nick Hornby's popular 1996 bloke comedy, High Fidelity.

Too bad you couldn't have been there to see her in action. Try to imagine it: you walk into the lobby of the Picador publishing company, near London's Victoria Station, and ask for "Bridget Cavendish." Moments later, an elevator disgorges a grinning Renee Zellweger, wearing gray pants, a green sweater, and blue Skechers sneakers. And sounding like Helena Bonham Carter.

"Sit thay-uh," she says warmly, pointing to a seat in the publicity department, cluttered with books and manuscripts. Wrong seat. "No—thay-uh."

Here she spends her days running errands, phoning the newspapers to see if they're going to review Picador books—doing the "ring-round," as they say—and scanning the tabloids for relevant articles. Her "boss," head of publicity Camilla Elworthy, has been indulgent. "She hasn't yelled at me, because I think she's too smart to put anything like an author's well-being into my hands," says Zellweger/Cavendish. "I was an English major, and I love it. Went to a staff meeting yesterday and they were deciding where to 'slot' each book." Did she say anything at the meeting? "Yeah," she replies. '"Does anybody want coffee?' What else could I say? 'Cream and sugar?'"

She is under the impression that, apart from one or two insiders, no one here knows her real identity—which, given the hothouse nature of publishing offices, seems overly optimistic. She is shocked and amazed that publishing types arrive after 9:30 and take spectacularly long lunches. She is reminded of how little money publishing types are paid. She nods thoughtfully.

Several tabloids are spread across her desk. The irony is thick, in that these publications are ardently covering her. "Yeah, it's weird," she says, flicking through pages which have been chockablock with rubbish, including one false report that she had rented "clown strippers" for Carrey. Or, she says, "how I have a wedding ring. How I'm pregnant. How I'm a 'Texan comic.'"

That last jab, which she finds particularly bemusing, stems from the British media's predictably whiny backlash against the hiring of an American—a Texan, no less—to play the effete Bridget Jones. "Of all the clunking, Hollywood idiocy," wrote the London Evening Standard. "The only funny thing about Bridget Jones is that she's not young and perfect—casting her as a young and perfect thing is like remaking The Elephant Man with Jude Law." Then there's the matter of Helen Fielding, who was quoted as saying that she was outraged by the casting choice, thus setting off another dust storm.

It turns out that the 40-ish Fielding, a jaunty sort, had said that she was outraged only that she herself hadn't been cast in the lead, opposite Hugh Grant and Colin Firth. (The director is first-timer Sharon Maguire, a BBC filmmaker.) As for the whole Hollywood Girl uproar, it should be noted that the fictional Bridget Jones is not fat—in fact, she's described as "slender"—but Zellweger is nevertheless "porking up" in order to conform to the character's jaundiced self-image. "To be self-deprecating but have no reason to be self-deprecating—I would think that would be annoying to watch for two hours," she says. "You'd go, 'Stop talking about her chubby thighs!' It would be ridiculous, and even unlikable, as a character."

The novel's publisher, by the way, was Picador. And so Zellweger finds herself sitting here, in her little cubicle, cutting out, highlighting, and copying every single Bridget-related article. Then again, she is not without recourse. "Crap!" she scrawls above each tabloid report. "Absolute crap!"

Already this morning she has eaten two cream-filled doughnuts, a chocolate bar, and cashews. Now it's lunchtime, so she and Barbara Berkery find another little Italian place in the neighborhood. They are joined by Zellweger's amiable driver, a large, powerfully built man named Mark. Berkery, who helped Gwyneth Paltrow hone her accent for Shakespeare in Love, sits with Zellweger at the table, exaggeratedly mouthing silly linguistic phrases—"I daahnced awwwll night," "browwwn caaahhrr"—because, evidently, American and British people use different facial muscles when speaking.

"I can see the weight in your face," Mark says to Zellweger.

"No!" Zellweger shrieks, pulling at her cheeks. Pause. "I mean, how nice. "

She's in a typically friendly mood—until, for one last moment of horror, the J-word is foisted upon her. She displays her signature Zellweger squint and focuses on her napkin, spread neatly across her lap. "I don't know," she says as Mark and Berkery, inspecting their cuticles, begin to circle the wagons. "I was there for work. I didn't go there looking for love. All I know is that once he was gone I really missed him. Badly. So maybe I was falling in love. Obviously, I was. But that doesn't mean I knew that at the time, you know? It was a very important time for me, and that's all I want to say."

O.K. . . Uh . . . one more question, Ren—

Mark, placing his titanic forearms on the table, leans toward Zellweger's sweating interrogator. Winking playfully, he says, "Have you ever tried to walk with no legs?"

And Zellweger, flashing a smile of holy gratitude, just laughs and laughs.