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.”

You’ve been working on your current film for a few months. How do you balance being on set for long hours with being a mother?

“I love my life without work and I love my life with work. My mother, who’s a nurse, called me the other day when I was really stressed out from working a 15-hour day. And she was like, ‘Yeah, but think of it as a part-time job’. And I thought, ‘That’s actually right, it puts it in perspective’. I work incredibly hard for three months, but then I get a break. It’s about really enjoying my time off.

“I have to ask myself questions such as, ‘Where do I relax the most? Where are my children happiest?’ My ideal scenario is to do one movie a year. But as an actor, I don’t think you can do an awful lot of planning.

“In fact, my new philosophy in life is: ‘I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it’. I used to spend a lot of time thinking about the future, as if I could magically predict it if I planned it enough. And then I realised, I can’t.”

Was it your divorce that reinforced that for you [Reese and Ryan divorced in 2007 after seven years of marriage]?

“Yes. You reconsider certain things, but you just have to keep going. You have to keep it together for your kids and for yourself too. I’m trying to learn from the things that have happened in my life, live more in the moment and have more fun.

“Someone told me recently to live in the present, but make plans and take pictures. And I am. I’m writing more, I’m reading more. Going to more concerts. Jake and I went to Coachella [an annual music festival in California] this year.”

Would you say your approach to your relationship with Jake is different from your last one because of what you’ve been through in the past?

“I don’t know. But I do know I’m not trying to be something I’m not. As you get older, you know what you like and what you don’t like, and you’re not apologetic about it. I definitely feel much more confident. I used to judge myself so harshly – I think women in their twenties do. You’re hard on your body, you’re hard on yourself.

“But you start to realise that none of it is really all that important. As long as you’re comfortable, the best parts of yourself come through no matter what. Your mother can tell you that a million times, but you don’t understand it until you live it! I am much more secure and confident now – and I feel so young still. I have a lot of life to live. I want to learn and travel and see art and hear music to get me inspired.”

You’ve talked before about figuring out a role for yourself beyond acting…

“I especially love working and travelling with Avon. Signing on as their global ambassador matched what I was involved in doing personally; every charity I championed, like the Children’s Defense Fund and Save the Children, was for kids.

“But I discovered that, for me, the best way I can help kids is by empowering women. And all of a sudden I had this incredible sponsor behind these ideas I’ve been promoting for so long.”

What’s been a highlight?

“My favourite part has been going to the Avon representative conferences. The top sellers get together regularly and I’ll meet them and we get to ask each other whatever we want. They all have great stories and each one is different.

“I met one woman who was divorced and left to support three children. She couldn’t work two jobs, so she decided to be a representative and she did so well that she became a regional manager and now will be moving up again to be put in charge of a state.

“It’s amazing to see people’s drive to survive. It resonates with me. So I get to hug everybody and see that collective power of people working hard to take care of their families. It’s really moving.”

Part of your appeal is that people feel they can connect with you without knowing you. Why do you think that is?

“I believe we’re all the same – we’re all just people going through life, so maybe that comes through. I feel I’m so lucky to be able to do movies that create characters who are real women. I throw myself 100 per cent into things. It’s just deeply personal for me.

“I care a lot and I want to know that I’m making a difference. I grew up in a community where, every day of my life, my parents and grandparents would wake up and say, ‘What can I do for somebody else?’ In that sense, I do feel like I’m on this journey that has a greater purpose. I’m not totally there yet, but I’m finding my way.”

Reese’s next starring role

Ms W is using her star power to speak out against domestic violence and has lent her support to Avon’s new campaign (in conjunction with charity Refuge) Four Ways to Speak Out (fourwaystospeakout.com). And on International Women’s Day on 8 March, Reese will launch a piece of jewellery for Avon (£3; avonshop.co.uk) to help raise money for domestic violence charities internationally. Now that’s what we call spending with soul.

Reese introduces her new perfume: In Bloom

“I have a lot of favourite smells from growing up in the south [she was born in New Orleans, Louisiana] that I wanted to capture in this scent [left],” says Reese. “As a kid, I was always outside. There was a magnolia tree in the front yard that I think I spent most of first, second and third years of school in.

“And there was the smell of honeysuckle from the creek that ran down by our house. Gardenias were important too, because every Mother’s Day or on my birthday, my father would buy small bouquets or corsages for my mother and me.

“While we were working on the perfume, Avon asked me if I could explore other notes, but I kept going back to white flowers! The packaging reminds me of my grandma’s bureau, where she’d have little perfume bottles out. I love it.”

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

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…

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.”

Though she stands at just under 5′2″, the idea of Witherspoon, 33, unable to stand up to any man–no matter how insistently chatty–strikes you as surprising. After all, in the past three years, Witherspoon has won an Oscar for her portrait of June Carter Cash in Walk the Line; become the highest-paid woman in Hollywood (earning $15 to $20 million per film); divorced her husband of seven years, Ryan Phillippe (with whom she has two children, Ava, 9, and Deacon, 5), amid rumors of his infidelity; and started a romance with the highly adorable Jake Gyllenhaal, all under the microscopic scrutiny of the paparazzi and tabloid press, and all with an exceptional, admirable, almost inhuman level of grace and self-possession.

Now she is starring in this month’s hilarious, not-just-for-kids animated feature, Monsters vs. Aliens (in 3-D!), with the comedic dream team of Seth Rogen, Will Arnett, Stephen Colbert, Hugh Laurie, and Paul Rudd. She plays Susan Murphy, an ordinary girl who gets hit by a meteor on her wedding day and becomes Ginormica, a 49′11″-tall monster/superhero. She’ll follow that with roles in films by revered directors James L. Brooks (The Simpsons, As Good as It Gets, Broadcast News) and, reportedly, Cameron Crowe (Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous).

So, you wonder, as you dig into your salad (Rivka brought one for you too), does Witherspoon ever feel like Ginormica, a normal girl who gains incredible power and thinks…”I don’t know how I got here, but boy, I better make the most of it? Heck, yeah,” she says, finishing your thought. “Every day.”

Of course, some might argue that Witherspoon was never a normal girl. Growing up in Nashville, the daughter of a doctor (dad) and a professor of nursing (mom), she stepped into the spotlight early, modeling as a child and starring in her first film, The Man in the Moon, when she was only 14. She enrolled at Stanford in 1994 but dropped out to pursue acting full time. She met Phillippe on the set of Cruel Intentions, Ava was conceived, the two married, and by the time Witherspoon was 23, she found herself a mother, a wife, and, after her Golden Globe-nominated role as Tracy Flick in Election, one of Hollywood’s most sought-after actresses. Her spot-on comedic performance in Legally Blonde not only proved her box-office power (the film grossed more than $140 million) but made her an international star.

Witherspoon tells you she’s been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers, which attempts to explain why some people gain unusual success. She was, she says, “struck by the idea that to be a master at anything, you have to have 10,000 hours of practice at it. And that is what you accumulate over a lifetime. And I started when I was 14, working and working and working.”

James Mangold, the cowriter and director of Walk the Line, says that like Carter Cash, Witherspoon’s early years on-screen gave her a head start in “stagecraft. How to turn it on, how to turn it off, how to charm. That kind of professionalism comes from practice. You can’t learn it reading Drama-Logue,” he says. “Reese has it together when she arrives on set. She’s a real director’s friend. She knows how to guide the scene in for a picture-perfect landing.”

Witherspoon’s acting is thoughtful and respectful: She can have fun with Legally Blonde’s Elle Woods without making fun of her. It’s a quality that endears her to the public–you can laugh without fearing she’s going to make you the butt of the next joke. The same sensitivity is applied to her choices of scripts. “My whole drive to be an actor was finding roles that I really believed represent modern women, the struggles that we deal with,” Witherspoon says. “Women who are strong and capable and in control of their own lives.”

Carter Cash epitomizes those qualities, and it was in Walk the Line that Witherspoon made the shift from great to jaw-dropping. Brooks says it was this performance–”filled with life!”–that made him realize she was indispensable to his new project. “Talented. She’s talented! She is really talented. And you know, a big brain, like, whoa!” he says. He describes her skill level as so high, it’s historically significant. “When I think of the great women’s comedy parts…she could play any of them,” he says. “The Apartment; if Reese had walked in when I was doing Broadcast News; The Philadelphia Story; I know she could have done Bringing Up Baby; Tootsie.”

Speaking of Tootsie, suddenly there he (she?) is, Dustin Hoffman in the flesh–”tan and all salt-and-peppery and handsome,” as Witherspoon describes him with a rakish twinkle in her eye–walking past your picnic table in what is apparently the most celebrity-ridden random courtyard in Los Angeles. The two kiss hello and chat. After he leaves, Witherspoon explains how they met a decade ago when The New York Times asked veteran actors to name a young face who reminded them of themselves. Hoffman picked Witherspoon.

You call Hoffman later to ask him why he made such an unlikely choice. “In Election, she did something that I like to try doing–I’m not saying I succeed–which is push the reality right to the edge of farce, without labeling it as farce. Now that character, Tracy Flick, has become an archetype,” he says. “I don’t know if that happens unless you tread those dangerous waters. And I don’t think you can teach that. It’s a gift.”

Witherspoon, who was raised Episcopalian and still goes to church, brushes off compliments about her talent and instead looks for metaphysical explanations. “I still think to this day, What is the purpose and what is the meaning of it?” she says. “And I do believe there’s a bigger journey. And I believe I’m on a bigger spiritual journey.”

She’s never been interested in the typical trappings of celebrity and consequently avoided the vices that have felled other ingenues. She describes the time in her life when everything took off as lonely, rather than a euphoric tour of A-list parties. “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,” she says, laughing. “No one else who was 22 had a baby. I couldn’t go out.”

But she did develop a tight circle of girlfriends who became her “salvation,” she says. “That’s always been the center of my life, female friendships.” (When you ask her what hidden talents she has besides acting, she names running–”I can just go and go and go and go”; caring for farm animals–she has pigs, goats, and chickens on the farm an hour outside of L.A. that she bought last year; and being a friend–”I’ll drop anything for a friend.”) She values the “shared human experience, you know, when women are honest with each other,” she says. “It’s hard having kids. It’s hard having a job. It’s hard having a relationship–for anybody.”

Likewise, the years following her Oscar win in 2006 have been challenging. Witherspoon last spoke to ELLE nearly two years ago, when her life was midmaelstrom. “I was, like, a raw nerve. I was just a fragile little nerve, you know? I’m not much better,” she says, letting out a rueful chuckle. “I have, like, one layer of coating.”

She describes her divorce, finalized last spring, as “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,” she says. “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.” She looks away, watching the cars pass by on the boulevard as she talks.

“It takes a long time because your life sort of reconstitutes itself. And your purposes are different. And that’s hard, you know? It’s also hard–a lot of marriages are about different kinds of responsibilities to each other. Like, sometimes–”

Suddenly she stops midsentence as though someone hit the pause button. “I’m not even gonna go there. No, no, no, it’s not relevant,” she says, turning back to you and switching gears. “You see a lot of people play this blame game. Blame, blame, blame. You know? And it’s a really easy thing to do, and I’m certainly guilty of it. [You have to] look at yourself and go, ‘What part of this do I need to own? Which part of this is my responsibility?’ And that’s the painful work that you have to go through to hopefully get some real life knowledge out of it.”

Ultimately, she says, the experience has been a “great redirection” for her. “It’s really a great revelation for someone who’s done so much by a certain age. Everything isn’t by design. You’re not in control of everything. You control very, very little, you know? That was a revelation. Changed my life.”

On her divorce: “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, Nothings ever gonna make sense again.”

On dealing with the pain that stems from divorce: “You see a lot of people play this blame game. Blame, blame, blame. You know? And it’s a really easy thing to do, and I’m certainly guilty of it. [You have to] look at yourself and go, ‘What part of this do I need to own? Which part of this is my responsibility? And that’s the painful work that you have to go through to hopefully get some real life knowledge out of it.”

On boyfriend, Jake Gyllenhaal: “He’s fabulous. He really is a fantastic guy. Unfortunately, he’s not in the movie, so we can’t really talk about him.”

On being a young mother: “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.”

From Elle.com

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.”

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.”

Reese attended Harpeth Hall, an exclusive all-girls private prep school in Nashville. Despite being well-liked student, a gymnast, a cheerleader, and a debutante, she says she never felt fully accepted. She wanted to seem normal, like everyone else, despite having been in local TV commercials at 7 and starring in her first movie, The Man in the Moon, at 14.

“I feel like I am seeking understanding. Popularity is not part of it. Popularity is literally about behaving the right way and saying the right things. To me, that was easy. But I wanted to be understood. I still feel like no one really knows me.”

In 1994, Reese entered Stanford University, in Palo Alto, as an English major. She left after a year to make a movie Twilight, a movie with Paul Newman.

“I was at a place in my life where I was trying to decide whether I wanted to be a pediatric cardiologist, although I wasn’t that great in science, or an actor. Then somebody called and said, ‘Would you like to make a movie with Paul Newman?’ I ended up doing this wonderful movie, Twilight with Paul Newman and Gene Hackman. It was an extraordinary experience for me to work with Paul.

“I loved Stanford, and I wish I had gone back and finished. Today, if I were not an actor, I’d probably be a social anthropologist or a psychologist. I have an endless curiosity about people. But then I think, ‘I’ve been very lucky. I don’t regret the path I went on in life’.

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.”

When Reese first arrived in L.A., she quickly felt that the treatment of women by Hollywood was repugnant—and she still feels that it is.

“It takes perseverance and determination for any young woman to navigate the movie business,” she says. “It’s deeply offensive when they are objectified, treated like sex toys. It’s so easy to get attention early on in your career when you promote only the sexual side of yourself. It gains you popularity, but it doesn’t mean anything. Five years later, no one knows your name, and you wonder why.

“Trust me, I’ve had my moments,” she adds. “I’m like a junkyard dog. I’d say, ‘Why are they asking me to wear a bikini?’ I get tough, because I see the slippery slope. I’ve heard the way roles are cast. There are a lot of women who don’t respect themselves and hurt themselves. I grew up knowing strong women who value who you are and what you contribute to life.” This sense of strength still helps Reese today.

“Turning 30 was really big for me,” she says. “I can get really stuck on ‘I don’t like this or that about myself.’ I’ve found that the only thing that breaks that for me is being able to spend time alone, going to the movies by myself or going to art museums alone. I do that a lot. I’ve discovered the importance of even 15 or 30 minutes a day where it is just me.”

Since their divorce, both Reese and Ryan continue to share the care of their children. Both kids, she says, still know they have the same two parents. “My ex-husband is very involved in raising our beautiful children,” she says. “We’re very lucky because we both grew up in working families in middle America. We’re on the same page that way. When we’re with our children, we’re very good about checking ourselves.

“I’m teaching the children what we were taught growing up—a real set of rules, discipline, and love,” she says. “Children thrive with a sense of structure, and they’re frightened without it. The ways you behave, how you speak to other people—those things don’t leave you.”

I ask if she worries about her children’s safety. “After my second baby, I was scared,” she recalls. “It’s hard to protect your babies from the press and all the people out there wanting a part of you. It made me hibernate a little bit more. I got very ‘Mama Bear’ and protective. You give birth, and worry and guilt come with it. It’s a natural part of being a parent. But for me, the most difficult part is seeing my children being followed and harassed. They’ve been treated terribly. They were shouted at in their Halloween costumes, photographers screaming, ‘You don’t look scared!’ We used to take our daughter to a wonderful school, and she was so harassed that we had to take her out. I hope not to live in this place forever.

“The biggest detriment of my life is tabloid fame,” she continues. “It removes me from people. When I first meet someone, it is so hard for me to overcome everything they’ve read about me. It’s not fair. It’s difficult, because I’m the kind of person who just wants to hug people.”

Since her divorce, Reese’s long friendship with actor Jake Gyllenhaal, 27, has garnered increasing media attention. A year ago, as she and Jake starred together in the film Rendition and her divorce was being finalized, the media speculation about their romance heated up. When Jake’s in Los Angeles, he reportedly stays at her home. Recently, Jake, Reese, and her kids have been spotted together in London and Paris, leading to questions of possible marriage.

“Family is all we have in life, but I don’t know how I feel about marriage,” she tells me. “Obviously, I’m not far enough out of being married to think about doing it again. You sort of reconstitute your family. You find a family, with people who come into your life for a reason.

“I definitely still have a capacity to love,” she continues. “Someone said to me once, ‘No matter what breakup you went through or what new love you find—the love you remember, like the love you now value, is yours. Whatever love you once gave to somebody else, it doesn’t go away. Even if it is only remembered love, it belongs to you.’”

Reese smiles.

“Things change,” she says, “but your ability to love remains intact. Oh, I have a lot of hope for love! I do!”

From Parade.com

You can read an excerpt of the article by clicking on the continuation link below.

Cut to Paris—not just any Paris but the very center, the Place de la Concorde, where Reese Witherspoon is the American of note, or at least the best-dressed American in the vast statue- and fountain-filled square. It’s the day after Bastille Day, and the city is winding down from its national celebration under a blue summer sky. A small flock of tourists and the lunchtime rush of mopeds and miniature Mercedes-Benzes pass beneath the lingering lazy red, white, and blue flags. Now slowly zoom in on the Hôtel de Crillon’s Marie Antoinette suite—where the queen took piano lessons until she lost her head out in the square—ornamented with beautiful tapestries and Corinthian columns. Then pan left to take in the view: the Tuileries garden, the Eiffel Tower, and, beyond the River Seine, the Palais Bourbon—an iconic vista that Reese Witherspoon slips into perfectly, first in a Nina Ricci dress that seems designed for her because it was, and then in a bustier-based Alexander McQueen concoction that makes her look like a queen. Not a let-them-eat-cake kind of queen. Quite the opposite. Reese is obsessed with the women (and men) on the Paris street, observing them as if they were the film stars. “People are so chic here!” she had said the previous day, sitting at a café before taking a stroll. “Everyone has so much personal style, I want to take pictures!”

Reese takes her spot on the Crillon’s balcony, along the eighteenth-century ledge, her outstretched arm framing the view of Paris generally, and in particular the obelisk of Luxor, a 3,300-year-old gift from Egypt to France that is perfectly aligned between I. M. Pei’s Pyramids at the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe. These days, Reese’s own star is in alignment, in part because of her range as an actress. After last year’s thriller Rendition, she’s returned to romantic comedy in Four Christmases, costarring with Vince Vaughn in a role that reminds us that Reese Witherspoon is the kind of star we like to think of as being just like us: hardworking, from a small town, with a young family, a star who considers herself lucky to be a star, as we’d like to think we would—even though, believe it or not, it’s a lot of work being a star. But will she maintain her trademark humble grace even here, in Paris, striking a pose of extreme elegance, as if the idea of fashion had been dreamed up with her in mind?

The answer: yes. When she pauses for a moment to look behind her, she mentally gulps. “I’d never been to the Crillon,” she says shortly afterward, “and the view is just so striking. Every once in a while you’re hit with moments when you think, Really? This is my life? How lucky am I?”

When the shoot is finished, she calls over a friend who is holding a regular point-and-shoot digital camera. “Can you take a picture, please?” she asks. She wants a snapshot of her wearing this dress, in Paris, for her mom. Big smile. Click. Cut.

Near the Champs-Élysées, at a corner café on Avenue Montaigne, Reese is lunching on a plate of greens that resembles a study by Seurat hanging in the Musée d’Orsay, with a little dollop of crab that seems too elegant to eat but is too tasty not to. All around, buzzing, talking, smoking, the cafégoers notice but do not interrupt the cinema star—they are the French, who invented studied nonchalance.

“You know, the older I get—and I can only count on one hand the times I’ve been to Paris—I’m starting to feel like I understand the place a little better,” she says. “The people just love the city, and I can really see what they love about it.”

She’s relaxed, as opposed to the person she plays in Four Christmases, in which she’s more than a little high-strung. It’s a comedy about a young San Francisco couple who think of themselves as together, modern, and protected from the baggage of family traditions. “They have their own theology in life,” says Reese. “They work very hard. They live well. They eat at nice restaurants. They have all the modern amenities. They have every new technology you could have.” And they swear by one rule: Never go back home.

“They kind of want to avoid going home for the holidays,” says Vaughn. “They both have stuff with their parents.”

But they do have families—divorced parents, at that—and now, owing to a snafu at the airport, their relaxing Christmas vacation away from family becomes a forced visit with parents and stepparents whom they fear and love. “What they discover,” says Reese, “is that when you don’t have that kind of connection to family, when you avoid those things, you also avoid a lot in your relationship. So they discover a lot about themselves.”

For Vaughn, one of the bigger discoveries, he says, was just how easy his costar was to work with, despite what you may have read in the tabloids about their incompatibility. “She was great,” he says. “She’s just a great actor and can do a variety of things and do them well, whether it was physical comedy or more character-driven comedy or more dramatic stuff—she’s just a very talented actress.” He adds, “She’s extremely in touch with herself. I don’t really think there’s anything she can’t do.”

One thing she apparently couldn’t do was resist Vaughn’s sense of humor—according to Reese, she was in hysterics a lot of the time. “Vince is the funniest person I’ve ever worked with in my entire life,” she says. “There were days when we were shooting things, I would laugh so hard it would ruin the take, and I was afraid I was going to pee on myself, it was so funny.”

The director, Seth Gordon, was impressed by how Reese encouraged the rest of the cast to make fun of her character—she could take it, she said—and how she pushed for an idea that helped set the tone for the film, a divorced-family group hug. “I think the message is that as quirky and complicated as family can be, at the end of the day that’s what matters most,” he says. “Reese was instrumental in keeping us focused on that.”

To make up for the comic degradations of her role in Four Christmases, in her next film, Monsters vs. Aliens, she will star as a female superhero—one of a group of monsters who are at first shunned and then called on to save the Earth. “I am a 50-foot woman,” she says. “No, wait, I’m the 49 ½-foot woman. It’s me and a sort of motley crew of monsters—kind of B-movie monsters.” The cast? “Dr. Cockroach—Hugh Laurie—is one, and there’s a kind of amorphous blob of material called B.O.B.; that’s Seth Rogen.”

Naturally, she is proud of the fact that the movie is one of the first animated features starring a female superhero, though the role is in some ways a stretch for her. “I have a history,” she says, “a long history of being stereotyped as a five-foot-two woman, which is very limiting.” It’s not a stretch at all to say that playing a female superhero touches on a theme in her career. “I’ve worked so hard to create characters that have dignity,” she says. “And I think everybody knows that I have a very pro-woman message in my work—and in my life.”

Her work for the Children’s Defense Fund and, more recently, for Avon—she is the first-ever Avon Global Ambassador—concerns women’s rights, as she sees it. In the case of Avon, she’s supporting an entrepreneurial version of micro-loans for women building financial networks around the globe—”whether it’s a woman in Texas getting a college education because she got the money to cover a baby-sitter while she goes to school,” she says, “or a woman in a village in Africa who has surpassed all expectations by creating a little network of salespeople within her community. The more work I’ve done with children around the world, the more I realize the way to help them is by empowering women, creating financial opportunities, and that’s something Avon is very dedicated to.”

In the meantime, a romantic comedy about the children of divorce appeals to her for other reasons, related to her own life: She recently finalized her divorce from Ryan Phillippe, whom she met during the filming of Cruel Intentions in 1999. “There are so many dynamics that people deal with all the time, and you don’t really see it in movies very much,” Reese says. “You don’t see the blended-family Christmas very much. And it really is a complication in a lot of people’s lives now. How do you see your mother and your father and not hurt anyone’s feelings? You know, I didn’t grow up like that. I mean, my parents are still married, and my grandparents stayed married, but it’s a situation my own children will have to deal with, so it was of interest to me.”

Romantic comedy suits her fine at the moment, generally speaking, from the vantage point of a single working mom—or a single-at-the-moment mom. And when she talks about why, you start to hear the part of Reese Witherspoon that her fans identify with, the Reese who understands that life isn’t just about standing in the Hôtel de Crillon. “I have to be honest with you,” she says. “Comedy is what I want to see at the movies these days. Life is frickin’ hard, man. I want to go to the movies and see people happy and enjoying themselves and having some fun. I’ve made other kinds of movies, for sure. But it’s pretty apparent to me that’s what people want. That’s what I want. I enjoy those kinds of movies.”

Reese’s first visit to Paris was with her parents in the summer of 1991, when she was just fifteen. Her first film, The Man in the Moon, was featured at the American film festival in Deauville. As a teenager in Nashville, where she’d mostly grown up, she was forbidden to wear black but nevertheless hoped one day to dress like Belinda Carlisle of the Go-Go’s. “I always thought she was hot—her tight black jeans and her black turtleneck,” Reese says. “I remember when I made my first paycheck, I went out and bought myself a pair of black jeans—oh, living on the edge!” On her first trip to Paris, she recalls, her mother dressed her in Laura Ashley or Jessica McClintock. The next time she was in Paris, in 1996, she was 20, opening in Freeway. She wore a strapless dress and went to the top of the Eiffel Tower and the fair in the Tuileries, and had her first encounter with paparazzi. She mostly remembers the dress, not the paparazzi. “I have a good memory for certain things. And a very short memory for painful things—that’s my favorite Martha Stewart quote, by the way.”

On one of her more recent trips to Paris, in 2005, she arrived the day after her Oscar nomination for Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash biopic in which she starred as June Carter Cash. She needed a dress. She wanted vintage. Her stylists, Clare and Nina Hallworth, went to work, and, as if she were involved in a sensitive Cold War spy negotiation, she was driven to an out-of-the-way arrondissement, down an alley where a Christian Dior dress made in the fifties for a princess, literally, was hanging in a dressmaker’s shop window.

Reese loved it. “And Nina said to me, ‘OK, there’s only one hitch….” At this point, we can imagine Reese looking at Nina, waiting.

“It’s not for sale,” Nina said.

“Are you joking?” Reese exclaimed.

The Hallworth sisters had a plan. Enter Nunzio Palamara, formerly of Versace, who in this case was like Harvey Keitel’s character in Pulp Fiction, a fashion fixer. Reese was pacing in her Paris hotel room, eager to get home quickly to her kids. Nunzio flew in to Charles de Gaulle airport from Milan, drove to the same out-of-the-way alley, greeted the dressmaker, pleaded, cajoled. Nothing—the dressmaker wouldn’t sell, as he, too, treasured the old jewel. For Plan B, Reese would try the dress on, in the shop, Nunzio hoping that the guy would sell it when he saw her in it, a kind of reverse Cinderella gamble.

“And then the dress,” Reese says. “I mean, let’s talk about this dress again—it was made in 1957, which was the year the single ‘I Walk the Line’ came out. I’m pretty sure it’s the year the single came out, or maybe it was after ‘I Walk the Line.’ How does it go?”

She pauses in the story to sing to herself, trying to recall the tune: “Oh, I never got over those blue eyes….”

Yes, she can really sing—and by the way, if you say so and add that you feel she was one of the very few people born to play June Carter Cash, she does a double take, with a mock-indignant smile, and says, “I was one of the few people born to be June Carter Cash? I was the only person born to play her—I mean, me and June Carter Cash.”

Back in the little Parisian dress shop, she tried the dress on. “It fit perfectly. I mean, like, it couldn’t have been more amazing,” she remembers, “and Nunzio is there and he’s talking in French and finally the man said, ‘You can have it.’ ” She wore it to the Oscars. She won an Oscar. “I don’t mean to sound hokey pokey, but the dress has energy in it,” she says. She will keep it forever. “My accountant got wind of the bill, and he called me and said, ‘Um, don’t you think you should auction this off?’ And I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ I will never ever ever ever ever sell it. I never thought I’d have a dress like that.”

On a more recent trip to Paris, she stopped in at Rochas and met Olivier Theyskens, then its artistic director, who was about to be named head of Nina Ricci. Every Oscar winner knows that if you need perfect clothes before you win an Oscar, you need them even more so afterward—and she couldn’t go through another vintage ordeal. Every newly named artistic director of a fashion house in Paris knows he needs a huge Hollywood actress. Thus a fashion match was made in Heaven—or in Paris, at least.

“When I met her at Rochas, it was not the right fit,” Olivier says. “But when I started at Ricci, I had a strong feeling about her being a real Ricci girl, and I showed her some drawings and she was really willing. She has been very willing. She has been cool.”

Along the Avenue Montaigne again, this time at Theyskens’s atelier, where Reese is dressed in a bustier-like Nina Ricci dress that, aside from being sexy, is a work of art. The mirrors of Theyskens’s office have become a spiraling prism of Reese Witherspoon in black, complemented by Olivier’s long, raven-black hair. She is talking about dinner the night before, when her boyfriend, Jake Gyllenhaal (who dropped by during makeup), wrote cute remarks in the restaurant’s guest book (something about French melons), which his girlfriend found charming, her smile now bubbling like champagne in a black crepe flute. “He wrote, ‘Vive la France!’ ” she says, laughing. Ah, Paris and love!

The next dress is more than a dress: It’s a gown with a skirt so architecturally structured—an autumnal red, with swanlike swoops of volume—that it won’t fit through the doorway, literally. It must live in the shop or be deconstructed. The craftspeople—pattern-makers, sewers, designers—are now sneaking in to have a look. Reese loves this. “You know,” she says, “I used to not understand fashion, a lot of it, but I completely understood being a playwright or a screenwriter and suddenly having an actor say your words and making them come to life. That I can understand. Finally, I’m starting to understand this.”

“Some dresses I work very hard on,” Olivier says, “but this was what I call a flash dress. It came to me in a flash.”

The first time the two collaborated was when Reese invited Olivier to Los Angeles. “So he came to my house and sat on the floor and started sketching,” she says. It was her first time having a Paris-based designer in her home. “Of course I put out tons of food and he didn’t eat anything,” she recalls. “He brought out two kinds of fabric—he brought out one gray and one yellow. And he said, ‘I think you are like this! I think you are like a party! I think you are wearing a yellow dress!’ ” He showed her the Nina Ricci perfume bottle, an echo of the dress. The yellow fabric became the gown she wore to the Golden Globe Awards in 2007. “The yellow dress with the bustier—for me it was the first thing that the world would see from me at Ricci,” Olivier says. “But still, I wanted it to fit with Reese. I was afraid. And it was Reese who picked that fabric. This was one of my favorite fabrics! She just fell right into it. She is very intuitive.”

How do they relate—a Southern girl from Tennessee and a French guy from Belgium? On an artistic level, you might say they are both working hard to appear effortless, doing the homework so that they never break a sweat at the final exam. On the other hand, Olivier thinks it has to do with age. “We are the same age, so we have some roots,” he says. “I am quite fascinated by roots of generations.” He also credits his knowledge of American fashion culture; he can talk to Americans about fashion because he knows where they are coming from. “I was looking at fashion, especially on CNN, with Elsa Klensch,” he says. “This was my whole youth. I systematically watched this show. I studied it.”

Essentially, though, they appear to have clicked. “If I do her an elegant dress, she can dress so elegant,” he says. “If I find a dress, she will find a way to be at her ease. I feel OK—I’m Olivier doing dresses! I’m superhappy about working, and everything is getting more fluid.”

On Bastille Day, Reese is at another café. She has done her share of cafés in Paris. “It’s the first time I’ve taken my kids,” she says. She believes in taking the kids. “My girlfriend was saying the other day that it’s like that famous Mark Twain line, about how travel is fatal to bigotry and narrow-mindedness—I’m paraphrasing, but it’s something like that.” Travel is also good for discovering croissants, crepes, and macaroons. Also for introducing her son to the toy boats at the Jardin du Luxembourg, or the French sewer tour. And then there’s the Métro, a five-year-old boy’s thrill. “He goes from one stop to another; it makes his day,” Reese says, beaming. And on that very evening, as the French celebrated, she and Monsieur Gyllenhaal would take her nine-year-old daughter out late to see the fireworks—the Seine glowing, the Eiffel Tower a sparkler. Reese is so high on Paris that now she jokes about making Legally Blonde 3. “Maybe she takes a trip to Paris,” she says. “Or maybe she’s like James Bond, but she’s Jane Blonde!”

Reese likes to talk about her kids, but she doesn’t have to. People can tell how she feels. “The thing I really respect a lot about Reese is that she’s a great mom,” says Vince Vaughn. “She was just great with her kids when they came to the set. She’d make time for them, and you could tell by the way they acted that they were very comfortable and loving with her.”

As far as the boyfriend goes, she doesn’t like to talk about him so much, and it can make you feel a little tabloid about asking. Still, this is Paris, city of light and love, and if you’ve heard the song by Carla Bruni about French president Nicolas Sarkozy—”I give you my body, my soul, and my chrysanthemum/For I am yours/You are my lord/You’re my darling/You’re my orgy/You’re my folly”—then you figure, what the heck, it’s Paris. You ask. “He’s very supportive,” she says. You press her. “Suffice it to say, I’m very happy in life, and I’m very lucky to have a lot of really supportive people around me who care very much for me, and, you know, that’s all you can hope for in life. I am very blessed in that way.”

She will tell you that she was with the guy she’d rather not blab about some weeks earlier—in Rome, speaking of beautiful cities—and that one night they went out to see the Trevi Fountain. It was late, it was beautiful, and she threw a coin in and made a wish. What did she wish for? Come on. Do you really think she’s going to tell you that? “If I tell you,” she says, “it won’t come true.”

“Innocence Abroad” has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the November 2008 issue of Vogue.

From Vogue.com