Often described as a successor to Meg Ryan, in the early Noughties she took the title of America's (latest) Sweetheart.
When I interviewed her in 2010, she may have been glass-half-full to a fault, her impeccable Southern manners dialled high, but she was also thoughtful and obviously intelligent; a complex person with darkness as well as light.
But in the years that followed her Oscars victory, Witherspoon made a series of films that invoked at best shrugs, and at worst sneers. It wasn't catastrophic -- in fact, the Oscar had helped her to become the best-paid actress in Hollywood, able to command $15 million-$20 million a film -- but her work didn't live up to her own hopes. Instead, she was seemingly stuck in a loop of crowd-pleasing romantic comedies that the critics hated (Just Like Heaven, Four Christmases, This Means War) and misfiring dramas such as Rendition.
Only recently has she admitted as much: "For a few years, I was a little bit lost as an artist," she said, "not being able to find what I wanted to do and making choices I wasn't ultimately very happy with."
Like many actresses, she found Hollywood wasn't interested in making films led by complex female characters, and particularly not those in their mid-30s. By 2010, Witherspoon was becoming increasingly frustrated. She was tired of the romcoms, but when she and her agent looked for more demanding roles, they came up blank. "I think literally one studio had a project for a female lead over 30," she recalled recently. "And I thought to myself, 'I've got to get busy.'?"
Reese Witherspoon on the red carpet.
The situation was all the more frustrating given that the studios appeared to have been working on false assumptions: that female-led films only interested female audiences, and that romantic comedies were safe bets.
Women have opened some of the biggest films of the past 12 months -- think Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay , or Angelina Jolie in Maleficent -- proving that having a woman in the lead role is no bar to success.
Meanwhile, Hollywood has had its fingers burnt in recent years with big-budget romcoms that failed to perform at the box office. One particularly embarrassing example starred Witherspoon alongside Jack Nicholson, Paul Rudd and Owen Wilson: the 2010 film How Do You Know, which cost $120 million but made back less than $50 million.
In 2010, Witherspoon decided to take matters into her own hands, joining the Australian producer Bruna Papandrea to set up production company Pacific Standard, with the goal of making the type of complex, female-driven stories that were largely absent from the screen. In Wild and Gone Girl, they found characters with the depth they had been looking for.
If it weren't for Witherspoon, Wild might never have made it to the big screen: she spotted the book before it was published, and snapped up the rights within days of reading it.
A memoir of the 1800km hike that helped Strayed get over the death of her mother, it tells how in her grief she slept with strangers in alleys and injected heroin. The story is not obviously cinematic: much of the action takes place in her head, and there is no pat ending.
"My agent told me, 'The only way this is ever going to get made is if an actress attaches herself to it because she wants to play that role'," says Strayed. "So you need not just an actress who passionately wants to make it, but one who's powerful enough in Hollywood that she can get it done. Reese was the first person we sent it to. She read it immediately and called me. And that was it."
Witherspoon moved just as decisively with Gone Girl, proving that she has a keen eye for a potential hit. She also planned to star as the film's slippery lead character, Amy Dunne, until David Fincher signed up as director and decided to cast the English actress Rosamund Pike instead. Witherspoon took the rejection on the chin: "When you get someone like David Fincher to agree to do your movie, you basically go, 'OK, whatever you want!' And get out of his way."
It paid off: Gone Girl has so far made nearly six times its $61 million budget.
Witherspoon's bookish side was something neither Papandrea nor Nick Hornby, who wrote the screenplay for Wild, had counted on.
Hornby recalls their first meeting at a party in 2010, where they had what he describes as "quite a surprising talk about books. She started talking about a short story of mine that had been in an anthology about 10 years ago," he says. "You can see in her performances that she's super-smart, but her literary side was a revelation to me." He was also impressed by her work ethic: "She gave me her email and phone number, not her manager's or agent's," he says. "She read everything I sent within 48 hours, and wrote very generous emails back. She was a great boss."
App users click here to see the trailer for Wild.
Papandrea also had her expectations turned on their head. "Would she really read everything, take the calls and move as quickly as you need to? That was a real test for me," she says, recalling her initial concerns. "I was kind of amazed: she's a force of nature."
Nor did Witherspoon demand star treatment, or approach their new company as a vanity project. She and Papandrea were offered overhead deals by studios, but opted to fund Pacific Standard themselves and stay independent and small, sub-letting office space from Working Title Films in Los Angeles and hiring a grand total of one employee.
As well as producing, Witherspoon also began taking small acting roles in striking films, such as Mud, in which she appeared as the object of Matthew McConaughey's affections. She has taken another small role in Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice (due out later this month).
Perhaps because they'd handed over control of Gone Girl to Fincher, who brought his own production team, when it came to Wild, Witherspoon and Papandrea decided to stay close to the project. They kept the film to themselves until they had a finished script, and shot it on a small budget.
Witherspoon threw herself into what she has since described as the hardest role of her career. The backpack that the actress hauls around on screen was as heavy as the one Strayed had carried herself, and the director, Jean-Marc Vallee, banned her from wearing any make-up (not a minor consideration for a major female film star).
She was nominated for a Golden Globe (losing out to Julianne Moore for Still Alice), and was Oscar nominated yesterday for best actress for her performance in Wild.
In November, news leaked of Big Little Lies, a television series based on the bestseller of the same name by Australian Liane Moriarty which Witherspoon is developing with Nicole Kidman and David E Kelley, creator of Ally McBeal. She's also developing two fantasy franchises, one with the studio behind Twilight and The Hunger Games. The message could hardly be clearer: you underestimate Witherspoon at your peril.
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