Renée Zellweger has revealed that she is “unapologetic” about the ageing process, and insists being at ease with getting older is “beautiful”.
The actress, 53, rose to fame aged 30 in Bridget Jones’s Diary, and has since won two Oscars.
Speaking to The Sunday Times’ Style magazine, the star said: “As long as we buy into the whole idea that society is obsessed with youth, then we perpetuate it.”
She continued: “Like, who’s doin’ it? Who’s redefining 50 or 60 without having to say, ‘Hey, look at me with my clothes off and I still look almost as good as I did back then?’ I don’t want to be ‘almost what I was’.
“I want to be a thousand times better! We have to shift the paradigm. You really can’t do anything meaningful when you are worrying about whether you still look like you’re in your twenties. You just can’t.”
Zellweger noted: “To be vibrant and beautiful you must embrace your age, otherwise you are living apologetically and to me that’s not beautiful at all.”
She argued that adverts for “creams and their fixes” telling us we don’t need to look our real age was actually suggesting that, at 53, you’re not “valuable anymore”.
The star added: “There is a big difference between being your absolute best, most vibrant self and wanting to be what you’re not.”
Read more: Renée Zellweger says plastic surgery rumours she faced made her ‘sad’
In August 2016, following rumours Zellweger had undergone cosmetic surgery, she penned a rebuttal in The Huffington Post.
She wrote: “Not that it’s anyone’s business, but I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes.”
Then, in 2019, the star told Vulture that “the implication” of the obsession over her appearance was that “I somehow needed to change what was going on because it wasn’t working.
“That makes me sad. I don’t look at beauty in that way. And I don’t think of myself in that way.”
Watch: Renée Zellweger hopes to make another Bridget Jones film
