American actor Renee Zellweger recently revealed that she took six years of break from acting because she was exhausted with it and wanted to explore new things. She took a sabbatical in 2010 after playing the lead role in the road film My Own Love Song.
The actress, who won an Oscar for her role in Cold Mountain, opened about this crucial career decision during an interview with Deadline.com. “The schedule had caught up to me and I wasn’t taking care of myself. I was really exhausted and making choices that weren’t necessarily healthy. I needed to step away from all the things that I felt.”
The Bridget Jones’s Diary star added, “I needed to try other things, things that didn’t fit into the schedule that I had found myself in service of, for such a long time. There’s never a good time to step away from unbelievable creative opportunities, but I needed to grow and I needed to challenge myself in a different way to figure out, I don’t know, a purpose, and live a little outside of the movie sets and promotional tours, and dresses and heels, and have authentic exchanges with people”.
Zellweger returned to the big screen career in 2016 with Bridget Jones’s Baby. She received praises for portraying actress Judy Garland in the biographical film Judy, for which she is now an Oscar contender.