In April America’s Premiere magazine published its latest annual survey of Hollywood’s Most Powerful. Here are some of the stars who were placed below Reese Witherspoon on the list: Will Smith, Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey, Ben Affleck, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. Money talks in Tinseltown, and Reese’s recent box-office results have been making plenty of noise.
The US first-weekend gross of Sweet Home Alabama — a nifty $35.6 million — represented the highest opening for a romantic comedy, beating the previous record holder Runaway Bride, and so knocking Julia Roberts off her perch.
And being the premier romcom princess is a bigger deal than you might imagine. A Reese flick is one whose only selling point is Reese: no comic book, videogame or nostalgic- TV-show brand; no expensive special effects; not even a leading male star as box-office insurance. In other words, Witherspoon pictures are relatively cheap to make and vastly profitable to the studios lucky enough to be in business with her. The only part that’s no longer a snip is her salary: $15 million for Legally Blonde 2 (see review).
The rise of Reese is explicable both as a blip (she’s a perky, funny, charming freak of nature) and as a trend: chick flicks are performing better than ever before. “The conventional wisdom used to be that girls will go to boy movies but boys won’t go to girl movies,” says Nancy Utley, the marketing president of Fox Searchlight, who masterminded the US campaign for Bend It Like Beckham. “So studios tended to make boy movies and tried to get both audiences.” Not any more. Now everyone is scrambling after the femme dollar, and actresses such as Kate Hudson and Brittany Murphy — stars of the surprise hits How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Just Married — are, like Witherspoon before them, experiencing massive salary boosts.
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But let’s get back to the blip theory. Why Reese? Much has been made of her knack for comedy. More significant is her ability to make sympathetic the bizarre protagonists that populate Hollywood’s high-concept frivolities.
Legally Blonde’s Elle Woods is a sweet, eager, pretty ball of fluff who scores unlikely victories thanks to determination and limitless knowledge of fashion. Witherspoon, reckons that the first film’s director, Robert Luketic, not only made the character “likeable”, she also “suggested an integrity”. In the process she created a female icon. “It’s about a woman who’s girlie and feminine,” says Reese, “but is also ambitious, successful and driven.” When Witherspoon was best known for portraying the relentless teen over-achiever Tracy Flick in the dark indie comedy Election, she would bristle at the inevitable comparisons, conceding only that “part of me is like that character”. Today she admits that, like her most famous roles: “I’m very ambitious and very focused.” She christened her production company Type A, after what her mum teasingly called her “Type A” personality — “driven, ambitious and obsessive”.
It is currently fashionable for even the most mainstream movie stars to appear uninterested in the success of their own films. Not Reese. “You have to evaluate the changing markets,” she said in 2001. “Today it matters how many people see your movie.” The actress was smart enough to realise that her cool phase — relatively edgy fare such as S.F.W (1994), Freeway (1996), Pleasantville (1998) and Cruel Intentions (1999) — would last only so long, and you either graduate to the mainstream or get shoved aside by the next style- mag-endorsed kooky chick who comes along. “At a certain point,” she told Entertainment Weekly, “you have to have commercial viability.”
In her movie roles Reese gets to showcase her sweetness and vulnerability, as well, of course, as her irrepressible perkiness. In magazine profiles, journalists tend to prefer to spotlight her professionalism, tenacity and ambition, if only for the sheer novelty of it all. It’s hard to resist her account of wooing her husband Ryan Phillippe (“I was definitely the aggressor. I was team leader — I made the moves”) or her no-nonsense attitude to performing: “I don’t f*** around. I don’t think it’s a joke that people put up $20 million to finance a movie. I show up. I know my lines.”
Becoming a mother — she is already pregnant with her second child — has added new pressures, in that she now feels the need “to be more of the woman I would want my daughter to be”. It is doubtful, however, that we really need our movie stars to achieve such pinnacles of perfection and even Reese worries it might one day all prove too much.
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“I’ve worked hard and pushed myself,” she said last year, “and in the end something is going to crack. I just don’t know what it is yet.”
CV: Reese Witherspoon
Born Laura Jeanne Reese Witherspoon in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on March 22, 1976
Childhood Grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, with her doctor father, nursing professor mother and elder brother. Attended private school, where she was Girl Scout, cheerleader and debutante
Marital status She married the actor Ryan Phillippe, with whom she starred in Cruel Intentions, in June 1999. Their daughter Ava is three, and she is due to give birth again in September
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Big break Her role as Tracy Flick in the critical and industry favourite Election (1999) changed Hollywood perceptions of her
Career high Legally Blonde (2001) The massive box-office success confirmed that she could “open” a movie, and made her a bankable star