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The Saturday Profile: REESE WITHERSPOON - Legally blonde. Physically
Independent, The (London), Aug 7, 2004 by FIONA STURGES
So Hollywood's Little Miss Perfect wants it to be known that she isn't so perfect after all. Describing herself as "prudish" and "nervous", 28-year-old Reese Witherspoon, the perky, pouty-lipped star of Election and Legally Blonde, revealed this week that she was so self-conscious about her body that she will never again be seen on screen wearing a bikini.
"I have cellulite," she told the magazine Vanity Fair. "I have stretch marks. My breasts are not what they were before I breastfed two children. I'm all about trying to make movies that have nothing to do with my body."
Witherspoon isn't the first Hollywood star to speak out about her imperfections. Kate Winslet, who is also 28 and has two children, has publicly compared her bottom to purple sprouting broccoli while older stars, including Jamie Lee Curtis and Demi Moore, have been more than upfront about their cosmetic surgery. While Witherspoon's remarks might be viewed as an attempt to convince us that she is a normal woman with the same insecurities and physical flaws as the rest of us, there's no reason why we shouldn't believe her. We know from the shots that appear in the centre spreads of gossip magazines revealing stars with cottage-cheese thighs and sweat patches that celebrities aren't as perfect as they'd have us believe.
Even so, few of us will be shedding tears on Witherspoon's behalf. While one can easily empathise with her neurosis - there aren't many who can flick through our holiday snaps without groaning at the sight of bulging stomachs, stretch marks and sunburn - it's worth putting things into perspective. This is a long-legged, clear-skinned, platinum-blond actress who in the past five years has commanded some of the biggest fees in Hollywood. She may not be conventionally beautiful, though, with her 1,000 watt smile and peaches-and-cream complexion, she is the epitome of all-American wholesomeness.
And it's this wholesomeness that Witherspoon has expertly subverted during her film career. In Election she played Tracy Flick, a dementedly ambitious high school princess in the running for president of the school council. In one of the film's many classic scenes, Tracy gets on her knees at bedtime and prays: "Dear Lord Jesus, now I really must insist that I win the election tomorrow." It was an inspired piece of casting that sent the actress's career into overdrive.
In Legally Blonde, Witherspoon played another sorority queen, albeit of a less poisonous variety, who goes to Harvard Law School. Her latest film, which is yet to be released in this country, is an adaptation of the classic novel Vanity Fair and sees her cast as the flame-haired schemer Becky Sharp.
At 28, Witherspoon is hardly washed up, though it's testament to the fickleness of casting directors that she believes her physical flaws could spell disaster for her career. She has remarked that comedy would be the key to her longevity, since "comedy doesn't sag". So far she has proved herself an actor of intelligence, ambition and great comic timing. Furthermore, she has cited role models that include Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon, Frances McDormand and Holly Hunter, all actresses known for their talent over their beauty. Witherspoon is attractive all right, but not threateningly so. She's an actress that young girls might aspire to be rather than the kind horny teenage boys pin up on their walls. Unlike her contemporaries Kirsten Dunst and Julia Stiles who seem to flit aimlessly between genres, never fully occupying them, Witherspoon has carved a niche all of her own.
Cellulite or no cellulite, for the next few years her future is secure.
Witherspoon has attributed her so-called prudishness to her Southern upbringing where, she claims, she wasn't allowed to wear black or bikinis. It was this background that she sent up in 2002's Sweet Home Alabama, a film about a successful New Yorker in denial about her down-home roots.
That's not to suggest that the real-life Witherspoon is just a simple Southern girl, mind you. Laura Jean Reese Witherspoon is in fact a descendant of the Scottish Calvinist John Knox and John Witherspoon who left Scotland for America to become one of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence. Witherspoon claims to have been a "dork" as a child who got by at school by making people laugh, though she excelled academically and in her final year "came out" as a debutante. She has described her parents, both of whom work in the medical profession, as "multi-achievers", and it was from them that she inherited her ambitious streak. John and Betty Witherspoon gave their stellar daughter the nickname "Little Type A", a moniker she used for her production company, Type A Films.
After leaving school she attended Stanford University in California to read English literature, but abandoned her studies after a year in order to concentrate on acting. Witherspoon began attracting the attention of casting directors in her early teens and made her film debut when she was 14, playing a lovesick tomboy in Robert Mulligan's Man in the Moon. She was also up for the role of Nick Nolte's sexually precocious daughter in Cape Fear but she fluffed the audition and the part went to Juliette Lewis. In the early Nineties, she appeared in a series of television movies, among them Wildflower, alongside Patricia Arquette, and Desperate Choices: To Save My Child, where she played a young girl with leukaemia. By the time she was in her early 20s she was landing decent roles in low- key movies including James Foley's Fear alongside Mark Wahlberg and Gary Ross's Pleasantville.
