Renee Zellweger speaks out against 'tabloid speculation' that she had plastic surgery

'Not that it’s anyone’s business, but I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes'

New York

Saturday 06 August 2016 02:48 BST

The actor appearing at a Foreign Press Association in August Kevin Winter/Getty

Renée Zellweger spoke out against the intense scrutiny by media outlets on her appearance over the past year, dismissing claims that she had plastic surgery and criticising the “tabloid speculations” reported by news sites.

In an essay published on The Huffington Post entitled “We Can Do Better”, Zellweger, 47, wanted to “make some claim on the truth of [her] life”, calling the evolution of “tabloid fodder” to the topic of mainstream discussion “troublesome”.

“Not that it’s anyone’s business, but I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes,” she said, dismissing the 2014 speculation that arose after a red carpet appearance.

“This fact is of no true import to anyone at all, but that the possibility alone was discussed among respected journalists and because a public conversation is a disconcerting illustration of news/entertainment confusion and society’s fixation on physicality.”

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

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1/12The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Anne Hathaway

The 32-year-old actress said she has already experiences job rejections because of her age. “Now I'm in my early thirties and I'm like, 'Why did that 24-year-old get that part? I was that 24-year-old once. I can't be upset about it, it's the way things are,” she told Glamour.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Helen Mirren

On news that Maggie Gyllenhaal had been turned down for being ‘too old’, aged 37, to play a 55-year-old man’s partner: “It’s f***ing outrageous. It’s ridiculous. Honestly, it’s so annoying. And ’twas ever thus. We all watched James Bond as he got more and more geriatric, and his girlfriends got younger and younger. It’s so annoying.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Maggie Gyllenhaal

Gyllenhaal revealed she was told by a Hollywood producer that she was too old, aged 37, to play the love interest of a 55-year-old man. “It was astonishing to me. It made me feel bad, and then it made feel angry, and then it made me laugh,” she said at the time.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep has helped fund an all-female screenwriters group called The Writer’s Lab to encourage more women to pen Hollywood scripts. She previously told Vogue in 2011: “Once women pass childbearing age they could only be seen as grotesque on some level.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Emma Thompson

The actress said she thought Hollywood is “still completely s***” when it comes to treating women equally to men. ““When I was younger, I really did think we were on our way to a better world. And when I look at it now, it is in a worse state than I have known it, particularly for women, and I find that very disturbing and sad.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Elizabeth Banks

Banks said she was driven from acting to directing due to the lack of roles for older women in Hollywood. “"[Industry sexism] drove me to direct for sure. I definitely was feeling that I was unfulfilled and a little bit bored by the things that were coming across my desk. I mean look at Gwyneth Paltrow who has her Oscar [for Shakespeare in Love] and played fifth banana to Iron Man,” she told Deadline.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Viola Davis

“I had never seen a 49-year-old, dark-skinned woman who is not a size 2 be a sexualised role in TV or film. I'm a sexual woman, but nothing in my career has ever identified me as a sexualised woman. I was the prototype of the ‘mommified’ role,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Liv Tyler

The Lord of the Rings actress said she only get cast in roles where she is treated as a “second class citizen” at the age of 38. “When you’re in your teens or twenties, there is an abundance of ingenue parts which are exciting to play. But at [my age], you’re usually the wife or the girlfriend - a sort of second-class citizen. There are more interesting roles for women when they get a bit older,” she told More magazine.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Cate Blanchett

The actress famously called out sexism on the red carpet at the 2014 Screen Actors Guild Awards. When a camera operator scanned her up and down, she said: “Do you do this to the guys?” In her Oscar acceptance speech for Blue Jasmine, she reminded the film industry that movies with leading women can still be successful. “And thank you to... those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films, with women at the centre, are niche experiences. They are not -- audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Ellen Page

Asked if she had ever encountered sexism in Hollywood, Page told The Guardian: ‘Oh my God, yeah! It's constant! It's how you're treated, it's how you're looked at, how you're expected to look in a photoshoot, it's how you're expected to shut up and not have an opinion, it's how you... If you're a girl and you don't fit the very specific vision of what a girl should be, which is always from a man's perspective, then you're a little bit at a loss.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Zoe Saldana

The actress says she refuses roles where she has to play the generic girlfriend, wife or sexy bombshell. "It's very hard being a woman in a man's world, and I recognised it was a man's world even when I was a kid. It's an inequality and injustice that drove me crazy, and which I always spoke out against — and I've always been outspoken,” she told Manhattan magazine.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Charlize Theron

The actress spoke to ELLE about negotiating equal pay for the Snow White and the Huntsman sequel: "This is a good time for us to bring this to a place of fairness, and girls need to know that being a feminist is a good thing. It doesn't mean that you hate men. It means equal rights. If you're doing the same job, you should be compensated and treated in the same way."

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Zellweger won an Academy Award for her 2003 performance in Cold Mountain. She is set to appear in the third installment of Bridget Jones’ Diary in September.

The actor’s essay comes at a moment when the standards placed on women in entertainment are being called out by the subjects themselves.

Friends actor Jennifer Aniston wrote a similar essay, also on Huffington Post, that was critical of tabloid speculation about her body.

“I am not pregnant,” she wrote. “I’m fed up with the sport-like scrutiny and body shaming that occurs daily under the guise of ‘journalism’, the ‘First Amendment’, and ‘celebrity news’.”

And in June, musician Sky Ferreira responded to an article published in LA Weekly that made her sex appeal the focus of the review rather than her music. At one point, the male reviewer compliments Ferreira’s “killer tits”.

“Ninety-five per cent of articles and interviews about me have had something offensive, false, or (sometimes extremely) sexist,” she tweeted. “...You’re either too fat or too thin or too pretty or ugly. That’s what I have been told my whole life since I was a little girl. …

“At this point, I care about the work I make because that’s what actually lasts and matters.