Taking The Lead Renee Zellweger Gets Her Shot As The Leading Lady In ‘Jerry Mcguire’ With Tom Cruise

The TV ads for “Jerry Maguire” show Tom Cruise smooching with a young woman with an adorable but unfamiliar face. Knowing her name - Renee Zellweger - won’t help most people place her.

Before she beat out Winona Ryder, Mira Sorvino and Marisa Tomei for the much sought-after role of Cruise’s love interest, Zellweger was specializing in trashy sex-kitten roles in movies nobody saw, among them “Love and a .45” and “Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

Curled up on a sofa, wearing a white sweatshirt, white jeans and no makeup, Zellweger (pronounced ZELL-wegg-er) looks even younger than her 27 years. She has the pixieish quality of a young Shirley MacLaine. Throwing up her hands, she says she has no idea how she came to be considered for “Jerry Maguire.”

One day out of the blue she received a call from her agent saying the film’s director, Cameron Crowe, wanted to meet her, and the next thing Zellweger knew, she was reading with Cruise.

“We had a really great day, and I was like, ‘Thank you, God. Thank you, God,’ because when I read I remembered all my lines and, you know, I didn’t look like a dork and that was all I was hoping for, so I went home a happy girl,” says Zellweger, whose sentences run on and on when she gets excited.

Being asked to return for a screen test was “really unexpected.” But the real shock was when she was given the part.

When they chose her, Crowe and producer James L. Brooks said they liked how offbeat Zellweger seemed and the fact that she wasn’t cowed in the presence of Cruise.

The money part confused Zellweger, who had never been part of a big Hollywood deal before. When her agent called to ask her if the salary they were offering was OK, “I’m like, you know, ‘Don’t talk to me about this because I’ll give them half my unemployment check and 10 percent of whatever I make in the next five years just to be in the movie,”’ she recalls.

Zellweger isn’t as naive about Hollywood as this sounds. “I understand it’s a business.”

For instance, she’s aware that when a huge draw like Cruise already is signed for a movie, studio executives sometimes are reluctant to pay millions for a female lead. So, to save money, they go down a rung.

Even given the economics, putting a complete unknown in a lead is pretty unusual. “I was definitely the bargain,” she acknowledges. Though she won’t give a figure, her salary “was more money than I ever made on a picture before. I’m not fixed for life, but the bills are paid and my dog has bones.” To hear her tell it, Cruise was a dream to work with. He plays a sports agent who decides to take a moral stand and gets fired for it. Zellweger is an accountant at the same firm who walks out the door with him. Surprise - they fall in love.

The two had lots of romantic scenes; getting closer to Cruise than most people, Zellweger has an answer to those persistent rumors that he is gay.

“To hell with the rumors. People are out of their minds if they have an inkling of doubt about Tom. When you see this man, you know. He’s dreamy. He is really sexy. And he’s the neatest guy in the world. No big ego, and such a gentleman all the time. And he is so in love with his wife (Nicole Kidman). It is so beautiful to watch the two of them together.”

Another romance starring Zellweger is coming out next month: “The Whole Wide World,” in which her co-star is Vincent D’Onofrio. The bittersweet movie is based on a memoir by Novalyne Price Ellis, a retired schoolteacher who writes about meeting pulp writer Robert E. Howard (“Conan the Barbarian”) in Texas during the early ‘30s and their on-again, off-again romance.

It seems like a lot is happening to Zellweger at once. “I’m trying not to think about the pressure. Things are pretty normal about my house. You know, barbecuing with the next-door neighbors.”

Zellweger is from Katy, Texas, a small town outside Houston. Her father came to this country from Switzerland, her mother from Norway. “My brother and I are the first American Zellwegers,” she says, adding that’s why she’s resisted suggestions to change her name to something more pronounceable.

While studying writing at the University of Texas in Austin, Zellweger took a drama course to fulfill a requirement - and found what she really wanted to do with her life.

After graduation, she stayed in Texas for several years, auditioning for every movie that was filmed there. It was a kind of apprenticeship. Sometimes she lucked out, getting bit parts in “Reality Bites” and “Dazed and Confused.” But not all the movies were at this level.

“I was, like, doing anything. They would say, ‘You want to be Cheesy Girl No. 3?’ and I’d go, ‘Like, really, can I be Cheesy Girl No. 3?’ It wasn’t about integrity or choices. It was about learning the work.”

She didn’t want to move to Hollywood until she was asked to do a film there, which finally happened when she landed the lead in “Love and a .45.” It was another sex-kitten role, this time with a fugitive element - she hides out from the police with her robber boyfriend.

Zellweger rented an apartment in West Hollywood, where she still lives with her dog. For several years she had a boyfriend - an actor she declines to name - in and out of her place. But that ended a year ago.

“I got my heart broken, stomped,” she says. When it’s suggested he’s probably sorry now, with her about to be on the big screen with Tom Cruise, she thinks this over.

“I’d rather he was sorry because he misses me.”