The hallmark of many an Oscar winner, nominee and/or serious actor is to delve so deeply into their roles that they both mentally and physically “become” the character. When it comes to method acting, the whole process sounds kind of creepy and possibly schizophrenic, but when it comes to the latter, it’s pretty straightforward and usually involves clothes, hair and makeup, and is sometimes accompanied by extreme weight loss (Christian Bale), a new nose (Nicole Kidman) or eating a whole bunch of doughnuts and pizza in order to get chubs fast à la Jared Leto and Renee Zellweger, who has already done it twice for those “Bridget Jones” movies. Today E! reports that Zellweger will forgo weight gain and instead wear a fat suit (like Gwyneth Paltrow in “Shallow Hal”) for “Bridget Jones 3.” [E!]

Oh really?

Last night Renee Zellweger appeared on David Letterman‘s “Late Show” looking mighty skinny. But I found myself ignoring her stick-thin arms when Letterman rolled out a guacamole-filled pinata and asked Renee to take a swing. We don’t know how they kept that green goo from going everywhere but Renee must not have eaten in quite a while because she kept asking, “Where are the chips?”

Bridget Jones is having a baby?! The British 40-something “singleton” will be back in a third film, this time focusing on her quest to become a mama. Based on author Helen Fielding’s newspaper columns instead of a book, Renee Zellweger will once again pork up her teensy frame to play the full-figured female cluelessly sabotaging her relationship with Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) and fighting her lingering attraction to ex-boss/lover Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant). No writer or director has been chosen yet to tell what should be a ridiculous adventure on the baby trail. So here are our predictions for Bridget’s third entry about life with “workaholics, alcoholics, commitment phobics, perverts and fu**wits” … and maybe a baby. [Variety]

First he went on a couple dinner dates with Jen Aniston—who, according to tabloid reports, has finally deemed him a big enough star to date—and now he’s cavorting with Renee Zellweger. YAWN. [NYC, 6/30/09]

With the news this morning that Renee Zellweger had a cancer scare back in 1996, we started thinking about just how many female celebrities have battled breast cancer in the last few years—it’s been almost as frequent as the number of those having twins! Christina Applegate, Sheryl Crowe, Melissa Etheridge, Edie Falco, Olivia Newton John, Cynthia Nixon, Robin Roberts, Kylie Minogue, and Elizabeth Edwards are among the many women in the news who have battled breast cancer and it really indicates how many more women NOT making headlines are facing the disease themselves. According to the Susan G. Komen For The Cure, nearly 200,000 women will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer this year and about 40,000 women will die from the disease. With that in mind, I wanted to compile a list of must know information for women about breast cancer—when to get checked out, what to look for, what your personal risk is, etc. Check it out, after the jump….