Bridget Jones Collection

Bridget Jones is a franchise based on the fictional columnist with the same name. English writer Helen Fielding started her Bridget Jones's Diary column in The Independent in 1995, chronicling the life of Bridget Jones as a thirtysomething single woman in London as she tries to make sense of life and love with the help of a surrogate «urban family» of friends in the 1990s.

The Mark Darcy character has a genuinely strange origin worth knowing: Fielding was sent to interview Colin Firth in Rome for an actual piece of journalism, and during that real interview, lapsed into Bridget Jones mode herself, fixating on Firth the way her own character would. Firth's role as Mr. Darcy in the acclaimed 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice was already the reference point the fictional Bridget was obsessed with — the novel's Mark Darcy is a deliberate transposition of that performance into modern London, down to Bridget working for a publisher called Pemberley Press, Darcy's estate in Austen's novel. When Firth was offered the film role years later, the in-joke is what won him over: he's said it let him "ridicule and liberate himself" from the character that had defined him. The first film's screenplay was co-written by Andrew Davies — the same writer who'd adapted the actual 1995 Pride and Prejudice — alongside Fielding and Richard Curtis, meaning the person who wrote the "real" Darcy also helped write this one.

Renée Zellweger's casting as Bridget caused real, publicly hostile backlash in Britain before the film ever opened — London's Evening Standard reportedly called it "clunking, Hollywood idiocy," on the level of casting Jude Law as the Elephant Man. She spent a month working at an actual British publishing house as research, gained roughly twenty pounds, and worked with a dialect coach to build the accent — while Firth, by some accounts, lost close to thirty pounds for the same production, the two leads physically transforming in opposite directions for the same film. Zellweger's performance ended up earning her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, turning what had been loud, confident skepticism into one of the more thoroughly vindicated casting choices of the era.