Renee's Bridget tongue-twister

Renee Zellweger struggled to recover Bridget's lispy British accent.

10:17 22 October 2004

Having to pile on the pounds again to reprise her role as Bridget Jones in the new sequel to 2001's Brit-flick chick-lit hit Bridget Jones' Diary was not the biggest problem Renee Zellweger faced in transforming herself back into the ditzy diarist.

The Texan star has admitted that she struggled to recover Bridget's lispy British accent.

"The dialect, boy, that I had to pay a lot of attention to. It was like starting over again. I was more terrified of it because it was something that evolved and it became very colloquial in a very specific way last time", the Daily Mirror newspaper reports her as saying.

Zellweger also revealed that she had a voice coach to help her throughout filming: "I had her there every day saying, 'No, that was too precise. Slushier, Slushier,' because Bridget has a kind of lisp thing she does."

The new movie, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, opens in the UK on November 12th.