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Bridget Rose Jones is a fictional character created by British writer Helen Fielding. Jones first appeared in Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary column in The Independent in 1995, which did not carry any byline. Thus, it seemed to be an actual personal diary chronicling the life of Jones as a thirtysomething single woman in London as she tries to make sense of life, love, and relationships with the help of a surrogate "urban family" of friends in the 1990s. The column was, in fact, a lampoon of women's obsession with love, marriage and romance as well as women's magazines such as Cosmopolitan and wider social trends in Britain at the time. Fielding published the novelisation of the column in 1996, followed by a sequel in 1999 called .
Both novels were adapted for film in 2001 and , starring Renée Zellweger as Bridget Jones, and Hugh Grant and Colin Firth as the men in her life: Daniel Cleaver and Mark Darcy, respectively. After Fielding had ceased to work for The Daily Telegraph in late 1998, the feature began again in The Independent on 4 August 2005 and finished in June 2006. Helen Fielding released a third novel in 2013 ( , which is set 14 years after the events of the second novel), and a fourth in 2016 ( Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries, where Bridget finds herself unexpectedly pregnant without being certain who the father is).
"Bridget Jones" is hailed as a British cultural icon and was named on the 2016 Woman's Hour Power List as one of seven women judged to have had the biggest impact on women's lives over the past 70 years. "Margaret Thatcher tops Woman's Hour Power List", BBC News (Arts & Entertainment), 14 December 2016.
Jones is a Bangor University graduate. She is a 34-year-old (32 in the first film adaptation) single woman whose life is a satirized version of the stereotypical single London 30-something in the 1990s and very unlucky in love. She has some bad habits—smoking and drinking—but she annually writes her New Year's resolutions in her diary, determined to stop smoking, drink no more than 14 alcohol units a week, and eat more "pulses" and try her best to lose weight.
In the two novels and screen adaptations, Bridget's mother is bored with her life as a housewife in the country and leaves Bridget's father. Bridget repeatedly flirts with her boss, Daniel Cleaver. A successful barrister named Mark Darcy also keeps popping into Bridget's life, being extremely awkward, and sometimes coming off a bit rude. After Bridget and Mark reach an understanding of each other and find a sort of happiness together, she gains some self-confidence and dramatically cuts down on her alcohol and cigarette consumption. However, Bridget's obsession with plus several misunderstandings cannot keep the couple together forever.
The column is continued into 2006. In the last entry, Bridget Jones gave birth to a baby boy, fathered by Daniel Cleaver, and moved in with him. However, Mark was not entirely out of the picture, as he previously suggested that he would like to adopt the child. The column finished with the note, "Bridget is giving every attention to the care of her newborn son – and is too busy to keep up her Diary for the time being."
The column appeared regularly every Wednesday on the pages of The Independent for almost three years: the last one was published on 10 September 1997. A couple of months later, on 15 November 1997, Helen Fielding resumed her weekly diary in The Daily Telegraph. Telegraph Columns 1997 Fielding ceased to work for The Daily Telegraph on 19 December 1998.
Fielding named the character of Mark Darcy after the Pride and Prejudice character Fitzwilliam Darcy and described him exactly like Colin Firth, who played Mr Darcy in the 1995 BBC adaptation. Mark Darcy was also partly modelled on a friend of Fielding's called Mark Muller, a barrister with chambers in Gray's Inn Square; and the Kurdish revolutionary leader whom Darcy defends in the movie was inspired by a real case of Muller's. The character of Shazzer was reportedly based on Sharon Maguire, who is a friend of Fielding and would become director of the film.Director Sharon Maguire in the audio commentary for Bridget Jones's Diary.
A third book was published in October 2013, titled . The novel is set in present-day London; Bridget is 51, still keeping a diary, but is also immersed in texting and experimenting with social media. It is revealed in the book that Mark Darcy had died five years earlier and that they have two children, Billy and Mabel, aged seven and five respectively. Publication of the novel was set for "Super Thursday", in preparation for Christmas. However, a mistake occurred in the early book prints which combined sections of the novel with Sir David Jason's autobiography. Vintage Books explained the error as "a Bridget moment" and recalled the books.
Pride and Prejudice screenwriter Andrew Davies collaborated on the screenplays for the 2001 and 2004 Bridget Jones films, which would show Crispin Bonham-Carter (Mr Bingley in Pride and Prejudice) and Lucy Robinson (Mrs Hurst) in minor roles. The self-referential in-joke between the projects intrigued Colin Firth and he accepted the role of Mark Darcy, as it gave him an opportunity to ridicule and liberate himself from his Pride and Prejudice character. Film critic James Berardinelli would later state that Firth "plays this part of exactly as he played the earlier role, making it evident that the two Darcys are essentially the same". The producers never found a solution to incorporate the Jones Firth interview in the second film but shot a spoof interview with Firth as himself and Renée Zellweger staying in-character as Bridget Jones after a day's wrap. The scene is available as a deleted scene on DVD.
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