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CHAIN-SMOKING memoirist icon Bridget Jones famously once said, ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going OK, another falls spectacularly to pieces.’ And yet, as Renée Zellweger, 55, shoots scenes for the new Bridget Jones film, Mad About The Boy, it appears that Bridget’s life hasn’t just fallen apart in one way, but fallen apart completely. That’s because, spoiler alert, Mark Darcy has been killed off: first by Helen Fielding in the 2013 book of the same name, then in Fielding’s screen adaptation.
That’s right, human-rights barrister and all-round good egg Darcy (who, we must remember, loved Bridget just as she was) is no more after being killed suddenly in Afghanistan on a work trip following their wedding at the end of the last Jones instalment, leaving her single once again in her fifties and raising their two children alone. It doesn’t sound like a romcom riot at face value, but we’ve got a feeling Fielding and Zellweger won’t let us down. In fact, Hugh Grant, aka magnetic miscreant Daniel Cleaver, who is making his return for the fourth film, has revealed he thinks this script is ‘the best one’ of all the Bridget Jones films.
‘It is very moving as well as funny,’ Grant, 63, said recently. ‘It’s partly based on Helen Fielding’s experiences of bringing up two children by herself after her husband died. And so Bridget is bringing up two kids and wondering whether she should ever go back to dating. It’s a very good script… in fact, one of the best scripts I h
