Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Renee ZellwegerA blink-and-you-missed-it marriage to a country singer Kenny Chesney it was so short-lived that even the actress herself sometimes forgets it ever happened — but it was one of the biggest celebrity dramas at the time. Twenty years on, let’s look back at what really happened to Renée ‘n’ Kenny…
How it started
Zellweger, now 55, and Chesney, now 56, first met at NBC’s Concert of Hope (tsunami relief telethon) in January 2005 — but it wasn’t a chance encounter. The Bridget Jones the actress was already planning to give the country star a message after admiring him from afar. Meanwhile, Chesney cited her as one of his favorite celebrities in a 2002 interview. Tennesseanhe says, “Here’s a country girl who keeps her feet on the ground.” You’ll never see her coming, so — bastard! — here it is. And that makes her really, really sexy. Plus, she looks like the kind of girl who could fit in and be at home anywhere.” His 1999 song “You Had Me From Hello” was also said to have been inspired by the actress uttering an almost identical line in 1996. Jerry Maguire.
The story as told by an entertainment expert and ex People editor-in-chief of the magazine Jess Cagleshe says that after the telethon, where Chesney was performing and Zellweger was answering the phones, he approached her and said, “I heard you’re trying to give me a message – don’t let the director find out!” and the pair immediately began to get to know each other.
“They had each other say hi,” Cagle said at the time. “At that point they exchanged numbers and emails and started a long-distance relationship that turned into a real romantic thing.”
The first public hint of the couple’s romance came in April, when Zellweger unexpectedly appeared on stage with Chesney at his show in Jacksonville, Florida, gave him a margarita and kissed him on the cheek.
How long did it take?
This is the part that got everyone talking.
After less than four months of dating, the couple married in May 2005 in an intimate ceremony at Chesney’s private estate on St. John in the US Virgin Islands. Wearing a Carolina Herrera gown, Zellweger was walked down the aisle by her father with 35 close friends and family in attendance.
It all seemed like a dream, but after less than four months, Zellweger filed for annulment, citing “fraud” as the reason for the split.
How it ended
When news of the shocking split broke, there was wild speculation about what “cheating” might mean, even leading to intrusive speculation about Chesney’s sexuality (which he later addressed head-on).
Zellweger released a statement to clear things up, saying she wanted to “make it clear that the term ‘fraud’ as it appears in the filing is only legal language and is not a reflection of Kenny’s character.” She added: “I would personally be very grateful for your support to refrain from making defamatory, hurtful, sensational or false conclusions, and I greatly appreciate your understanding that we hope to experience this transition as privately as possible.”
Sometimes relationships just don’t work out – just ask any famous couple who’s had their marriage annulled. “He said all the right things and me and the families got along well. And he seemed to be growing up just like me. It was almost like an arranged marriage, I felt, except that we chose (…)
What they said about themselves
Chesney responded to Zellweger’s statement in his own words. “It’s an incredibly sad time,” he said. “I just hope that everyone can respect the privacy that I know Renée has already requested.
But still the gossip rumbled on, forcing the couple to release another statement — this one, together and through their representatives. They said: “Miscommunication of the purpose of their marriage at the beginning is the sole reason for this annulment. Renée and Kenny value and respect each other and are saddened that their different goals are preventing this marriage from succeeding.
Both stars mostly declined soon after, but in November 2005, two months after the cancellation, Chesney, in an interview on View. “She and I fell in love like a couple of schoolboys,” he said. “I’m glad that it can happen, that it exists and we still really care about each other. It would be wrong if I didn’t meet her. She is amazing. I don’t want to sit here and say, ‘Poor me.’ I’m absolutely blessed and grateful.”
What are they saying now?
Now that more time had passed since the brief, one might say doomed marriage, both parties felt more able to talk about what really happened.
America’s darlings go sour sometimes. From Morgan Wallen to The Chicks, country music’s biggest names have been at the center of some major controversies. Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer found themselves in hot water in the early 2000s after sharing their personal politics on the public stage. When stepping across (…)
“I think people should live their lives the way they want, but I’m pretty sure I love girls,” Chesney said in 2009. Playboy interview. “I have a long line. girls who could testify that I’m not gay. In order for us to get an annulment, the legal documents could allege either physical abuse, which was not true, or three or four other things that were also not true. The best we could put out there was a scam. So I said, ‘Okay, do it. Anything’.”
He gave a few more details in a 2010 interview — and it sounded like he just wasn’t ready for marriage. “I look at my life as a box,” he said. “So everything I put into it — learning to play guitar, put it in the box. The friends I made. I put it in the box and my career took off. Out of that box grew this beautiful house… And you protect everything and all the relationships and all the people who helped you build that house. “It was out of the box. (Renée’s) sweet soul, no doubt about it, but I just wasn’t ready…. This is the first time I’m talking about it, but it happened.’
In another Playboy in an interview, in 2015 Chesney reflected even more on the turn of events and the impact on his life. “Nothing positive has come out of it in my life at all, I can tell you that,” he said. “I had no idea what real marriage meant. I was so used to committing to one thing – music – and then having to completely commit to another thing, marriage. I didn’t know how. It was a scary moment for me. I never had any paparazzi attention. It went from zero to the very other end of the spectrum. I would go to a concert and there would be helicopters circling trying to get a picture of me and her together. I thought it would always be like this. I just completely panicked. I did the only thing I knew to do: I ran. I pushed her away in every possible way – to the point where I no longer wanted to be married to her. It’s that simple. I still struggle with it. Was it right or wrong? I still think about her every day. Every day I wonder if he is okay. I mean, you don’t just fall in love with someone.”
Recently in interview in 2023 billboardChesney talked about how his experience with Zellweger made him lead his life more privately. “One of the reasons I’m so private is when my life started to change and people started caring on a different level, the only things I could keep to myself were the intimate details of my life,” he said. “The interesting thing is that we’ve already played in stadiums and then… I didn’t have social anxiety before that, then you add our success and then you add that to your life and you have a bit of social anxiety. And now that we deal with the way the world is today and how everything is social and how information is transmitted – yeah, you’d have to be crazy to want to be a celebrity these days.”
Some of country music’s best songs are about heartbreak—and the relationships that inspired them can be just as dramatic. Shania Twain learned this firsthand when her husband of 14 years, Robert “Mutt” Lange, had an affair with her former personal assistant, Marie-Anne Thiébaud, in May 2008.
Zellweger also spoke about the tumultuous period in her life, saying in a 2016 interview Lawyer that the speculation about Chesney’s sexuality really upset her. “I was saddened that people somehow used it as a way to be cruel and call someone gay as a pejorative, which has fatal consequences,” she said. “Of course, there’s the bigger issue of why anyone had to make up the story in the first place. I’m an old-fashioned girl who doesn’t feel it’s appropriate to hang laundry on the lawn. I feel that you devalue yourself as a human being when you share very personal things with many strangers who make fun of you. I just don’t see any dignity in that.’
Zellweger added that she often forgot the marriage ever happened, saying, “It’s a pretty big thing to forget, isn’t it?”
Key information about relationships
In retrospect, it seems like these two just got carried away with the romance and passion of being in love after admiring each other from afar – but forgot to really see if they were compatible. Both were in their early thirties at the time, and getting married was probably a given.
An unexpected match! Ant Anstead continued to make headlines after his split from Christina Haack when he sparked an A-list romance with Renée Zellweger. The Wheeler Dealers star was previously married to Haack for nearly two years before the pair announced their split via Instagram in September 2020. Nine months later, Us Weekly confirmed that (…)
Two decades later, the two are in a long-term relationship—just not with each other. Chesney dated a model and a dancer Mary Nolan since 2012 – and their relationship is extremely private – while Zellweger was with the British TV star and motoring specialist Ant Anstead from 2021. Interestingly, however, neither party ever remarried; did those disastrous few months set them both off for life?
