Bridget Jones's Diary - London Premiere 2001

London charity premiere 4 April 2001 The first big British film of the year premiered in London last night and quite an event it was. Half of Leicester Square was cordoned off as armfuls of celebrities piled into the Empire cinema for the British screen debut of Bridget Jones's Diary. Bridget fans stood ten-deep behind the barriers outside ready to catch a glimpse of Helen Fielding's neurotic heroine in the flesh. "I thought she [Zellweger] was absolutely perfect," Colin Firth told Empire Online. "She introduced herself to me in a British accent and I never doubted it. Before we even began shooting she was condemned with the unpardonable crime of not being English. But I think she'l be forgiven because she's answered it with a great performance. If acting's about anything then surely it's about playing something that you're actually not. Along with Hugh Grant, Firth plays one of Bridget's two love-interests in the film and was greeted by much swooning of female fans as he swept aloofly into the cinema. Firth was happy to reminisce over his favourite part of the film, the fist-fight with Hugh Grant: "Hugh and I had a long period of bonding during our martial arts training for that fight. It probably reminded you all a bit of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,the only difference being that they used treetops and we used a Greek restaurant." [From Empire Online]
	Grant was also remembered the scene with a certain fondness: "I've been wanting to kick the shit out of Colin Firth for some years and I finally got to do it," he told us. When asked who had, indeed, proved the better man Grant adopted a confident stance: "Well let me put it this way. Colin did marvellously in a fight scene for somebody who's clearly never been in a fight before. I on the other hand, had to hold back because, as you know, I used to be in the SAS and I was trained. I had to leave the SAS because I couldn't wear the balaclava helmets. I can't wear wool against my skin, I get a terrible rash."
Despite her cool demeanour, Zellweger confessed to being terrified by how the British were going to react to her performance. "I feel a huge responsibility to Helen Fielding, because it's not my character, I didn't come up with it. It's something she created from her life experience and I don't want to be the one to screw it up. Enthusing about the role, Zellweger squealed with delight over her chance to try on the British accent and admitted to having adopted a number of quaint Anglicisms: "I asked a friend in the States if I could use her looÇ the other day. She had no idea what I was talking about!" [From Empire Online] At last night's charity premiere, the American actress [Renee Zellweger] said she had "gone native" while making the film in Britain. "I have fallen in love with Britain. I drink tea and have beans on toast every day for breakfast. In California last week I asked someone the way to the loo and they didn't know what I was talking about." The event was also attended by the former Spice Girl, Geri Halliwell, who sings on the soundtrack. Halliwell wearing an aqua-green dress by Julien MacDonald, presented Zellweger with a bracelet that she had made herself, inscribed with the words "so hip it hurts". [From the Daily Telegraph, 5 April, 2001, by Richard Eden] Stephen Fry, Thora Birch, Stephen Daldry and Toni Collette were among the stars who turned out for the event along with cast members James Callis, Gemma Jones, Sally Phillips and Celia Imrie, screenwriter Richard Curtis and director Sharon Maguire.
Bridget Jones creator Helen Fielding was the last to arrive. "I think Renee's done a great job, she's got a better English accent than me," she told us. "It was very important that she put on the weight for the role, she still looks great but she is a normal-shaped woman in this film and that is really, really important. I think it's very sporting for a Hollywood actress to put on all that weight and then allow herself to be filmed in her knickers." [From Empire Online.] From the This Is London website:/.../ Bridget Jones's creator Helen Fielding wasn't Bridget Jones either, even if she did reckon that Renée Zellweger with all that extra weight on was still a skinnier proposition than she was. Anyone who has the clout to get Salman Rushdie, Lord Archer and Julian Barnes to have bit parts in the film of her book has put their Bridget Jones days behind them. It took Fielding herself to put an end to the mystery as to the whereabouts of Ms Jones. What, we asked her just as the party at Mezzo in Wardour Street was in full swing, would Bridget have been doing right then?
	(The possibilities were endless, and awful, given the presence of everything that Bridget finds so hard to resist: wine by the caseload, several violent-looking cocktails, cigarettes by the score and a clutch of irresponsibly handsome men, led by Mr Grant and Mr Firth). Ms Fielding had no doubt what her heroine would be up to. "She would probably still be trying to get in," she said. Quite what she would have made of it all had she got past the security is anybody's guess.

Stick insects and ex-Spice Girls aside, the party was, in a sense, a milieu in which Bridget Jones would have felt very much at home. It was all terribly Notting Hill, only not the Notting Hill of BJ and Shazzer and Jude getting drunk in 192, but the rather more sophisticated version of Alan Yentob, Salman Rushdie, Angus Deayton and Mr Notting Hill himself, Richard Curtis. Whether or not they live in W11 these days is debatable, but it is a racing certainty that they have all been to 192 at some time or another. With or without Shazzer and Jude.

Rushdie, who actually had a speaking part in the film, seemed rather taken with his foray into acting. "I'm waiting for the scripts to pour in," he said. He had only one regret: "There was one take in which Hugh Grant kissed me on the lips, and they cut it out. My first screen kiss, and they cut it.

The men might have been a problem for Bridget, however. No one who has read the Diary needs to have explained the significance of casting Colin Firth ("Fwaw, that Mr Darcy" in Pride and Prejudice, as Bridget Jones once put it) as the film's Mark Darcy, love rival to Hugh Grant's Daniel Cleaver. Irony piled upon irony: as one of the jokey captions on the wall at Mezzo read: "Minutes not spent fantasizing re getting off with Mr Darcy at premiere: 600."

Not that Colin Firth was getting off with anybody. When one woman (Karen, happily married) went up to him and said "I know I seem a bit of a dodgy stalker but I have to say hello," he "visibly sighed and looked very pissed off". Karen, it turned out, was not the only one. "Every time I looked at him there was a swarm of women around him," she said. "He was a magnet."

It's probably too late to ask now, but was one of them blonde, a bit overweight, smoking heavily, probably rather drunk and no doubt making a fool of herself? No reason, really. But it would be nice to think that she got in. [From the This Is London website, April 5, 2001]