Interview of the week: Renee Zellweger

NEW YORK, Jan. 2 (UPI) -- Those who recall Renee Zellweger's hilarious, ear-splitting karaoke performance in "Bridget Jones's Diary" will be pleasantly surprised to hear she can really belt out a tune in the film adaptation of the musical, "Chicago."

Told she was quite a revelation in the film, the freshly minted Golden Globe nominee gasps: "You really think? Because, see, I'm thinking that the really powerful voice comes from my counterpart, my Welsh friend (Catherine Zeta-Jones.)"

In the film, Zellweger and Zeta-Jones portray Roxie and Velma, ambitious, limelight-loving performers, who kill their lovers and end up sharing a cell-block under the watchful eye of prison matron, Mama, played by Queen Latifah. The foxy felons court celebrity in a bid to gain sympathy from the public and, they hope, their release.

Talking to United Press International about how her vocal training was strictly limited to showers, bars and friends' homes before she signed onto "Chicago," Zellweger is casual and adorable and speaks in a voice a notch above a whisper, starkly contrasting her vixen character.

"It started a long, long time ago in the shower with Paul McCartney records, Beatles records and my brother yelling, 'Shut up!'" the 33-year-old Texan recalls. "So, I just had it in my head that I couldn't sing. I think that he just wanted to beat me up about anything and everything, and you know, like a 6-year-old girl doing Paul McCartney covers, totally blaspheming his hero. I'm sure that had a lot to do with it."

That early bout of sibling rivalry was apparently enough to prevent the "Jerry Maguire" star from singing in front of her brother for more than 20 years. Zellweger says she briefly dusted off her vocal cords for the 1995 film, "Empire Records," in which she plays a girl afraid to sing, "who hits one good note," but points out that was pretty much it until "Bridget Jones's Diary."

"(That) was a blast for me to do," she giggles. "According to my brother, that's what he heard from the shower everyday in his mind. He was like, 'Yeah, that's it.'"

According to Zellweger, all of the songs for "Chicago" were recorded in less than a week before production on the film even began to give the actors parameters for their performances.

The actress admits that when she received the screenplay for the film, she was a bit bewildered about why director Rob Marshall thought she could pull it off.

"I got a script and I read it and I didn't understand it at all," she explains. "It didn't translate. I mean, I don't know the musical, I'd never seen it before. So, I'd never seen any of the numbers performed. So, I didn't know what (a lot of it) meant on the page, 'What the hell was that and what are you supposed to do with it?' I had no idea. So, I thought it was probably a very,

very bad idea."

Zellweger says that after initially saying "no thank you" to the role, a friend who has "extraordinary taste in human beings" encouraged her to at least talk to Marshall.

"He said, 'You have to meet this guy. I talked to him on the phone and his ideas were inspiring and he's really nice, you'll like him,'" she relates. Taking her pal's advice, the actress says she met Marshall and liked him so much, she decided to give Bill Condon's script another read.

"I thought was very interesting, but I still didn't understand it and after having met with Rob, he clarified some things," she notes. "We had the same taste in films, and we had the same ideas about what makes a musical good, about what makes certain films interesting."

Once she took the role, Zellweger says she put herself entirely in her director's capable hands.

"I just trusted him so much," she emphasizes. "It didn't occur to me that he could very well be very, very wrong, but it didn't matter."

She adds: "He is inspiring as a person. He is so kind. He is so clever. His creative genius was right there on the table at the Four Seasons Hotel, I knew it. I just knew it, and I thought, 'I'm going to go and I'm going to spend a whole lot of time with this guy and I'm going to make him my friend,' and that was it."

The actress says she can relate to the character of Roxie in that both she and the murderess live their lives relatively honestly.

"Our life perspectives are very, very different," she laughs. "Completely different, I would say. In fact, the way she looks at life and the choices that she makes are antithetical to those that I make in my own life. So, I wouldn't say that there was anything about her that I could identify with except for her honesty."

Considered one of Hollywood's most down-to-earth performers, Zellweger insists she is not enticed by the trappings that come with being a celebrity.

"Fame in my life is another job that comes with the job that I love so much," she notes. "It is not something that I aspired to, it's not an existence that I aspire to live. It's neither here nor there to me, and usually, I'm really, really busy with my life, personally, which is very insular, small or I'm very busy working. So, I don't really see it."

Zellweger's weight and health have recently been the subject of unkind, unsubstantiated tabloid reports. Slim and sporting flattering glasses and a short bob hair-do, Zellweger looked the picture of health when she was in New York last month promoting "Chicago."

So, does it bother her when gossipmongers say cruel, untrue things about her? Zellweger says she tries to avoid reading the reports, but confesses she sometimes can't escape them.

"I get sent (some stories) and I'm curious about certain things, and sometimes, it can't be helped because you're in line at the grocery store and there's your head (on the cover,)" she says.

Asked how she deals with fame, Zellweger repeats advice that filmmaker Mike Nichols gave her just before "Jerry Maguire" came out in 1996.

"He said: 'You know, it's a little bit like Medusa,'" she explains. "'You can't look it in the eye, and you can't look at it and acknowledge that it's there because if you do look straight at it and embrace it, it turns you stone cold. It turns you into stone,' and he said, 'But if you ignore the fact that it's there, it can be very dangerous,' and he said, 'You've kind of got to be aware that it's sort of right there, over your shoulder, and every now and then, look at it as a reflection through something else,' and I thought that that was extraordinarily wise, and I do. I look at it through something else. I look at it through the things that are real in my life."