“Bridget Jones’s Diary”: A Modern Romantic Comedy Classic Turns 20
20 years ago today, a film adaptation of Helen Fielding’s best-selling novel about a thirtysomething British singleton was released in theaters. It was an enormous box office hit, propelled Renee Zellweger’s career into the stratosphere, and spawned two commercially successful sequels. On the anniversary of its release, I look back at what made it such a popular film and how it holds up two decades later.
The Origin and Initial Release of Bridget Jones’s Diary
The story of Bridget Jones’s Diary begins in the mid-1990s when The Independent, a London-based newspaper, approached author Helen Fielding about writing a series of columns about her travails as a thirtysomething singleton. She thought it would be too embarrassing to make it autobiographical so instead she created an exaggerated comic character named Bridget Jones, whose diary entries she would publish anonymously in the periodical.
Fielding’s anonymity didn’t last long, but the impact of the character she created certainly did. The publishing company she was writing a novel for asked her to scrap her plan and instead convert her Bridget Jones columns into a novel. She agreed and borrowed heavily from Jane Austen’s 1813 masterpiece Pride and Prejudice for themes and plot structure. The novel was published in 1996 to rave…
