Reese is on the cover and inside the February 2010 issue of “InStyle” magazine in the UK! You can read an excerpt from her article below – and get more information about the magazine at instyle.co.uk.

She’s an Oscar-winning actress with one of the hottest careers in Hollywood. But off-duty, Reese Witherspoon is a down-to-earth southern belle who adores her kids, cooking with boyfriend Jake Gyllenhaal and clothes-swapping with friends…

By Nicole Vecchiarelli. Photographs Mark Abrahams. Styling Elizabeth Stewart

In a corner of Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market (an indoor farmers’ market housed in a converted train station), Reese Witherspoon waits patiently in line for a table at the Down Home Diner. It’s a busy Saturday morning and golf buddies are gathering for their weekly brunch at one table, while a mother peels her son off the jukebox at another.

Reese might be one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood, with a best actress Oscar (for 2005’s Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, with Joaquin Phoenix) and a slew of popular films to her name, but here, amid the perfume of the diner’s famed hickory-smoked bacon and waitresses juggling their plates, she blends in just fine.

Jake Gyllenhaal, her boyfriend of two and a half years, is off exploring the market’s cluttered stalls and will return later to show off the breakfast sausage and fried chicken he’s collected to bring home to her children (their father is her ex-husband, actor Ryan Phillippe) Ava, ten, and Deacon, 6. The foursome have set up camp in Philadelphia while Reese works on a movie (as yet untitled), in which she stars as a professional softball player opposite Paul Rudd and Owen Wilson. She’s got the slightest trace of a shiner under her left eye from a catch gone wrong, but her make-up-free face doesn’t betray any sleepiness from another late night of filming.

Wearing a blue shirt and a casual linen miniskirt, the 33-year-old goes mostly unnoticed in the crowded joint. She slides into a booth, orders an egg-white scramble with a side of biscuits (which are like savoury breakfast scones) and catches up with InStyle about what’s been going on in her world.

You’re about to get a few weeks off after you finish filming your latest project. How would you describe your life when you’re not working?

“I try to exercise every day. I like to run for about an hour and I’m big into working out with girlfriends. It’s an acquired skill, being able to discuss your love life, children and friends – all while you’re running! But we have mastered it.”

What else do you do when you’re just hanging out with your girlfriends?

“There are three of us who wear pretty much the same size, so we’ll get together on a Friday night and I’ll bring clothes I want to trade and they’ll bring theirs. We swap shoes and handbags a lot. I wore my girlfriend’s dress to a wedding recently. It’s fun.”

Does your daughter Ava go through your closet?

“Sometimes. She’s almost as tall as me – it’s getting scary. But when she and Deacon get home from school, it’s more about gymnastics, horse riding, karate, or whatever.”

Do you like to cook?

“I do. And Jake is a great cook – he does it a lot. We spend the weekends outside LA in Ojai [in southern California], where I have a farmhouse. We have chickens and we grow cucumbers and tomatoes. I love it. It reminds me of where I grew up in [Nashville] Tennessee.”

Do you find it’s hard to raise your children so far from where you spent your childhood?

“Sometimes it’s really difficult for me, being far away from home. LA is where my job is and I have to be close, but I never imagined that my children wouldn’t grow up next door to my brother’s children. Or that my mum and dad wouldn’t constantly be around.

“You know, I had dinner every night with my grandparents as a kid, so I think missing out on that is a hard compromise. At least I have a lot of southern friends in LA – I gravitate toward them. I think of those people as a part of my family: they take care of me and I take care of them.”

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Reese has been named as one of “People” magazine’s “most beautiful of 2009″ – in the “beautiful at every age” section.

REESE WITHERSPOON, 33 She’s an Oscar winner (for 2005’s Walk the Line), but to children Ava, 9, and Deacon, 5, she’s “a regular, embarrassing old mom,” the actress told Parents magazine. “Realizing you’re not anything special to the kids is always a great sort of reminder that you’re just a regular person,” Witherspoon said.

From People

Reese is featured on the cover of the June 2009 issue of the UK Edition of “Elle” magazine!

This time last year Reese Witherspoon had just finalised her ‘very humiliating and very isolating’ divorce from actor Ryan Phillippe. And while she still has days when she thinks, ‘nothing is ever going to make sense again’, something or should we say someone has put a smile back on her face.

Could that person be her boyfriend Jake Gyllenhaal? ‘He’s fabulous. He really is a fantastic guy’, she reveals to ELLE’s Rachel Combe.

She also sets the record straight on the uptight, ‘Type A’ personality she’s been labelled.

‘The Type A thing is a big misunderstanding’, says Reese Witherspoon. ‘It’s funny to me that I have been portrayed as a closed-off, uptight person. I’m very open.’ ‘Type A is my blood type’ which she insists, that’s as far as any similarities go.

The magazine goes on sale tomorrow in the UK and you can check out more features at Elle UK…

Reese is currently on the April 2009 issue of “Elle” magazine. The issue is in stores now – so make sure you go ahead and grab a copy! Check out a preview of the article and some amazing photos in this post!

We’ll have HQ scans from the magazine soon – I have to get my scanner out of storage first. LOL

At the last minute, lunch at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills is canceled. Instead, you’re given an address in Los Angeles where, you’re told, there will be a bench to sit on. Your taxi dumps you in front of a nondescript strip mall, the paint on the building number so peeled you can barely make it out. People gawk a little. (Who takes a taxi in Los Angeles, after all?) There are benches in the courtyard, but nobody is waiting for you. This can’t be the right place. You walk out front again and blink in the unseasonably hot, bright desert sun at the faded street number. You read the directory of building tenants: a hair salon, a dentist, a private detective. You go back to the bench and wait.

A dark-haired, heavily pregnant woman approaches. “Are you Rachael? I’m Rivka, Reese’s assistant. She’s running late.” Rivka apologizes–Reese recently moved her production company, Type A Films, to the building, but the furniture hasn’t arrived yet so meetings are being held alfresco. She then stands discreetly to the side to urgently talk on her cell phone with someone about Jake’s salad: She has Jake’s salad. She can’t leave to give Jake his salad. Because she has Reese’s salad. Can someone pick up Jake’s salad? And so on. An hour goes by.

And then you hear the click-click of heels on the concrete walk and a slight figure appears, clad all in black: black skinny jeans, black T-shirt, black kitten-heeled Louboutins, blond hair, silvery-blue eyes, big smile. Reese Witherspoon has entered the courtyard. “I’m so sorry! I was stuck in a meeting with a bunch of men who like to hear themselves talk and won’t let you leave!” She rolls her eyes and shakes her head. “So, so sorry.”

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Reese Witherspoon has called her 2005 divorce from Ryan Phillippe “humiliating and very isolating”.

Witherspoon and Phillippe – who have two children together – ended their relationship after almost 8-years of marriage.

And the Legally Blonde beauty admits the love split was hard to deal with.

Reese tells the April issue of Elle magazine, “Very humiliating and very isolating…But, by the way, if it’s not painful, maybe it wasn’t the right decision to marry to begin with. Those are the appropriate emotions. When people get in your face and say, ‘This will pass,’ you think, Are they crazy?

“I’m never gonna feel any better than I feel right this minute and nothing’s ever gonna make sense again. And I still have moments where I’m like, nothing’s ever gonna make sense again.”

On boyfriend Jake Gyllenhaal, Witherspoon added: “He’s fabulous. He really is a fantastic guy.”

And on being a young mother Reese – who is mom to Ava, 8, and Deacon, 4 – said: “When I first had Ava, I couldn’t afford [help]. And it was so hard.

“I was out in Los Angeles, living [away from my family]. I really didn’t have any friends. And I had a baby. No one else who was 22 had a baby. I couldn’t go out.”

Parade.com has a “web-exclusive” interview with Reese. Check it out below! Remember, Reese’s issue of “Parade” will be in newspapers tomorrow!

Reese Witherspoon says that she and her former husband, actor Ryan Phillippe, try to raise their two children as normally as possible, despite having divorced last year. She tells me that she uses the lessons she learned as a child to bring up her own kids today. Reese and Ryan have two children, son Deacon, 5, and daughter Ava, 8.

“Now that I have children of my own, my childhood in Nashville, Tennessee keeps coming back to me. Both my parents worked, so my brother and I used to walk home from school everyday or my grandmother would come pick us up and take us home. Most people come from two working parents. You just can’t survive now, especially in this economy, without each parent having a job. My parents couldn’t have paid the bills if my mother hadn’t also worked.”

Reese’s father, John, is an ear, nose and throat surgeon who served in the U.S. military. Her mother, Betty, holds a doctorate in pediatric nursing.

“Today I see more men at my children’s school dropping off and picking up their kids, really participating in their lives more than when I was growing up. I do think things are evolving, and it’s becoming more important for parents to be more equal and balanced in raising children.

“I teach my children what was taught to me, although I’m not really aware I’m even doing it. I have a real sense of morality that was instilled in me when I was young, these traditions and family values that stay with you despite the ups and downs of your life. It was a very different value system than I see now.

“The other day my son said to me, ‘Mama, why do I have to take off my hat in the house?’ I was like, ‘Because it’s respectful. That’s why you take off your hat.’ And he goes, ‘And I always have to take off my hat in church, too!’ It really bothered him. But those values sustain a life. Respect. Faith. Empathy. Compassion.

“I want my own children to have some sense in them that there is something bigger than us in the universe, that they are not in control of everything. You’re going to know lows in your life that you never expected, and highs that you won’t know how to process. Knowing that there is something bigger than us out there — God is there — that really helps.”

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Reese is going to be on the cover of the November 23, 2008 issue of “Parade” magazine! The magazine is a supplement in most U.S. newspapers that arrive on Sundays. Check out a preview of the cover to the left and read the article below.

I have great hope for love

‘Do I need men?” actress reese Witherspoon asks. “I don’t think it’s about needing men. It’s about love.”

Sitting in a quiet corner of a Beverly Hills hotel lounge overlooking a garden, Reese wears a chic black dress, black open-toe pumps, and gold dangle earrings. An Oscar-winner for 2005’s Walk the Line, Reese, 32, is reportedly the world’s highest-paid actress. She is also astonishingly beautiful. Her new movie, Four Christmases, a comedy about family ties co-starring Vince Vaughn, opens this month.

“Everybody needs love,” she tells me. “Everyone deserves it.”

The great love of Reese’s life was once actor Ryan Phillippe, 34. They met at her 21st birthday party in 1997 and married two years later. She admits that in some respects she was naïve to believe that her marriage would last forever. “I wasn’t good about protecting myself,” she explains. “I spent a lot of my 20s just trying to make other people happy, rather than trying to figure out if doing that made me happy.”

Three months after they wed, their daughter Ava, now 8, was born. A son, Deacon, arrived in 2003. Then, a year ago, she and Ryan divorced.

“There are things in my life that are hard to reconcile, like divorce,” she says. “Sometimes it is very difficult to make sense of how it could possibly happen. Laying blame is so easy. I don’t have time for hate or negativity in my life. There’s no room for it. When you make wrong choices, you have to take responsibility for them: ‘What part of this do I own?’”

She pauses and takes a sip of tea. “I struggle to figure out what made me make those choices,” she admits. “All I can hope for is that I’ve learned something from it and won’t make the same choices again.”

Reese became a movie star by choosing to play tough, single-minded careerists or conniving, manipulative social climbers in films like Election, Legally Blonde, and Vanity Fair. However, in person, she is nothing like the movie roles that made her famous. Instead, vulnerability underlies her finishing-school poise.

“I want to be understood,” she says. “Even as a child, I didn’t feel like I was. I still see that part of myself that wants approval, and that’s a constant need.”

Reese was raised with traditional values in Nashville, the only daughter in a devout Episcopalian family. She has an older brother. Her father, John, is a surgeon, and her mother, Betty, is a professor of nursing. “It was a close-knit community,” she recalls. “We’d go to church and see people in need in the pew next to us, and I was taught compassion and service by watching my parents helping them.”

Today, Reese remains active in charities that help children and abused women, like the Avon Foundation and Save the Children. “It’s not acceptable in this country that one in six children lives below the poverty line,” she states. “People have to get back to really taking care of one another.”

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