The girl done

v. good

Heat – May 2001

It was only released three weeks ago but Bridget Jones is already on course to become the highest grossing British film ever. Heat finds out how it happened.

apart from being one of the most lucrative fictional characters in modern British literary history, Bridget Jones could have been any woman on any Street in Britain. That's why she worked as well as she did. So well, in fact, that the film of the book, which - with its sequel The Edge Of Reason - has already shifted in excess of seven million copies in 30-odd countries, topped the American movie charts and had the biggest opening weekend of any British film in history over here, pipping Notting Hill by more than a million pounds. So, where did she come from, this emotional wreck more disaster-prone than anyone since Frank Spencer and with more neuroses than a barrel load of teenagers? She first reared her straggly-haired head in a column in The Independent on 28 February 1995 (though she was poached by The Daily Telegraph a couple of years later). As the creation of Helen Fielding, a 36-year-old Oxford graduate who had worked in TV before becoming a freelance journalist, Bridget was supposed to put the boot into consumer culture but soon became a loveable screw-up, a cult among the readers of over-sized newspapers and a hate figure for feminists, who loathed how pathetic she was.

Fielding lay low for a while, writing the odd food review, before revealing herself to be its author. She denies to this day that she is the template for Bridget Jones, though she does admit that Bridget's obsession with calorie-counting comes from her own student diaries, while her friends reckon she's just as funny as Bridget, if not more so. She can also be disorganised, finishing The Edge Of Reason just four weeks before it was due in shops. And like Bridget, she was single, living in her own flat in north London (Primrose Hill, to be precise), and getting the same sort of aggro from Smug Marrieds over why she wasn't hitched. But while she may have been coy about owning up to being Bridget, the inspiration for Bridget's "singleton" friends wasn't so tricky to establish, even if it did turn out that the media darlings in question were more likely to be sharing a bottle of Burgundy in ultra-hip restaurant The Sugar Club than house Chardonnay in Café Rouge. Tracey MacLeod was the presenter of BBC1's arts series The Late Show and was mortified to find that she was the model for self-help book-reading, vile-boyfriend-dating Jude. Until she began to enjoy her new-found notoriety, that is.

Sharon Maguire, a BBC documentary and advert director, was the easily-traceable real-life Shazzer - well, she did use phrases like "emotional fuckwittage" that wound up in the book. She went on to direct the Bridget Jones movie, so her nose couldn't have been put too far out of joint. As for Bridget's gay friend, Tom, MacLeod reckons there were three main contenders clamouring to be unmasked as him - that is, until Tom had a facelift in the column, then those candidates weren't so eager to be identified. As for the picture of the girl with the wine glass and the fag on the cover of the book, that was Susannah Lewis, a former secretary at The Independent who just happened to be around when the paper needed a pie to illustrate the new column.

The journey from newspaper column to best-selling novel carne when Helen proposed it as the second part of a two-book deal that she had signed with publishers Picador. She'd already written one novel, Cause Celeb, a piss-take of her time taking stars to Africa to make films for Comic Relief, but Picador weren't convinced at first that the column, reworked as a modern-day version of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, had what it took to become a successful novel. Erm, duh! The book was huger than Bridget thought her backside was.

Working Title, the British film production company behind Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, pounced on it immediately. With Bridget Jones mania already rife, the movie version had its own built-in hype. Immediately, there was the, "Who's going to be Bridget?" debate. Originally, Kate Winslet was pencilled in, then it was decided she was too calm. Helen Mirren was too old. Imelda Staunton was not foxy enough. Patsy Kensit was not, erm, screwed up enough. Even Geri Halliwell was tossed into the hat as a rank outsider (though years later, film-makers would ask her to record It's Raining Men for the soundtrack). Helena Bonham-Carter was in the frame and then, just as everyone, it seemed, had plumped for Cate Blanchett, who'd got an Oscar nomination for Elizabeth, a little-known Texan called Renée Zellweger was signed up.

"Of all the clunking Hollywood idiocy," raged the newspapers. Previously best known as Tom Cruise's love interest in Jerry Maguire and Jim Carrey's main squeeze, Zellweger was determined to prove that her American accent, beauty and skinny frame wouldn't be an obstacle to her becoming Bridget. Her director packed her off to Picador for two weeks of incognito work experience to learn how to be a book publicist like Bridget, while lunch breaks were spent with her voice coach, stuffing her face with high-fat empty calories to increase her less than eight stones by nearly two more.

Fielding was on the case with the script and called in an old college mate of hers to improve her original draft, screenwriter Richard Curtis, who just happened to be the man behind not only The Vicar Of Dibley, but Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill. Apart from tinkering with the script, Curtis was instrumental in signing up Hugh Grant, who had the mickey ripped out of him in Bridget Jones the novel over the whole Divine Brown fiasco. He signed along with Colin Firth, who had played Mr Darcy in the TV adaptation of Pride And Prejudice that both Bridget and Fielding had obsessed over. Another Pride And Prejudice connection was Andrew Davies, the man behind the adaptation of Jane Austen's novel for TV, who carne in to help Curtis give the script a final polish.

There was little doubt that Bridget Jones was going to be as big on screen as she was in print, especially since the early buzz from journalists who'd seen previews was good bordering on great. UK ticket sales alone covered the cost of the movie in just 17 days while the film went to the top of the American charts and managed to get the soundtrack, featuring British acts little known outside the UK such as Gabrielle and Robbie Williams, well inside the US top 40.

So, where are they now? Fielding, who describes herself as being "as shallow as a puddle" is now an extremely wealthy woman, thanks to the royalties, living in West Hollywood with her boyfriend Kevin Curran, who writes for The Simpsons. She has given up smoking, has become friends with Helena Bonham-Carter and is enjoying her big house with a palm-fringed pool. "Shazzer" Maguire is overnight one of the hottest directors in the world while Tracey MacLeod continues with her career as a successful journalist. And Renée has said that if fhey want her to be in the sequel, something will have to give as she has no intention of fattening up again. But as the sequel has Bridget stuck in a Thai jail, skinny Renée can probably play it as she is.