What emerges first from the gloomy hallway is the glistening hair, so tightly coiffed that she would look like a gold-topped Audrey Hepburn, were it not for the natural tomboy strut that's fighting it out with her sheath-like little black dress. here, on the outskirts of Miramax's Golden Globes party, which buzzes behind her like a giant munching insect, stands Renée Zellweger. She’s unaccompanied for the moment, but for one prized accessory—the Golden Globe she was awarded three hours ago for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy. Zellweger spots a new visitor and makes a high-pitched squeak of welcome and celebration, a noise that seems to acknowledge several things: the follow-up interview appointment she’s been postponing; the strangeness of holding her heavy, kitschy, gold-leaf prize; and the embar rassment of being called out from the ladies’ room while her presenter, Hugh Grant, filled time on international TV (“She’s under the table?. . . She’s disappeared. . . .”). “It was surreal,” she says in her crispy-voiced, Texas-twang way. “I was sure I had big chunks of lipstick on my teeth.”

Zellweger’s talent for self-deprecation, an enormous part of her appeal and a gift she deploys with great skill, seldom cuts much deeper than this. We’ll see her this month as the weight-obsessed, man-tormented single Englishwoman who compiles Bridget Jones’s Diary, but since that picture wrapped last August, she’s shed 25 pounds, a taffy-thick English accent, and, distressingly, boyfriend Jim Carrey. Although Zellweger, who turns 32 this month, has a more formidable inner resilience than her screen work tends to let on, right about now she may be agreeing with Bridget Jones’s observation that “everyone knows that dating in your thirties is not the happy-go-lucky free-for-all it was when you were twenty-two. . . .”

This line appears on page ten, and by page 259 Bridget is italicizing “Oh, God, I’m so lonely.” Much happens in the few pages between that point and the story’s end, but as director Sharon Maguire says of Helen Fielding’s best-selling book and the film she has made from it, “There is a truth in there about loneliness, and sometimes it dresses itself up as comedy, because that’s all it can do, you know—otherwise, you cry.”

Bridget Jones has bigger image issues than having lipstick on her teeth. Shlepping around ten pounds more than she’d like, she goes for the brie, the booze, and the tobacco. Physically, the character couldn’t be further away from the real Zellweger, who, in a move one can’t imagine most of her female peers agreeing to make, gamely glutted herself on meat and dairy to gain some 15 pounds. “To do Renée credit,” Maguire says, “the plumper she looked and the more cellulite she had, the better it was for her.” Despite her pudgy neck and midriff and array of vices, Jones, as conjured by Zellweger, may prove to be this year’s most captivating movie heroine.