The Next Bridget Jones?

While Renee Zellweger has now been established as poster-child for neurotic thirtysomethings everwhere, she may soon be in for some competition. Waif-like star Gwyneth Paltrow will soon be competing for the position as every woman’s role model when she takes the lead in America’s answer to Bridget Jones’s Diary. Me Times Three, a novel by New York Times writer Alex Witchel, has been touted in the US as their version of Helen Fielding’s bestseller. On track to make the transition from written word to big-screen romcom, the film will star Paltrow as the reluctant assistant editor of a woman’s magazine during the 1980s. Devoted to her Wall Street boyfriend and utterly entrenched in the era’s (shudder) yuppie lifestyle, her life is thrown into disarray when she discovers her man is secretly engaged to two other women. Witchel's novel may well have the appeal to sell volumes in the US. But while the world has embraced Zellweger's plump heroine, stick-thin Paltrow's chances of inspiring the same kind of global sisterhood are far from a sure thing.