Renee Zellweger was in a Dark Place Before Vital Career Break

Renee Zellweger was in a terribly dark place before she chose to take a Hollywood hiatus that became a six-year career break.

The Jerry Maguire star, who is on the verge of a major comeback with a much-anticipated Judy Garland biopic, tells Red magazine she made a series of bad choices in her life and needed to take a break to get herself back on track.

"I got some bad advice," she explains. "It was pretty dark. And sad."

The 50-year-old doesn't go into details but insists she made the right decision and learned a lot about herself, while she was out of the spotlight: "I don’t look at it as wasted life, because I learned a lot from it - and that’s what I needed, I guess. I learned a lot about perspective. To recognise different patterns of my behaviour. To understand different consequences.

"I was away for a while and, in all honesty, it was because I wasn’t taking care of myself. I looked like I wasn’t taking care of myself. I felt like I wasn’t taking care of myself. And I was so bored with myself. It had got to the point where I felt like I was sitting beside myself when I was filming, watching myself and rolling my eyes. And going, 'Oh, shut up!' and, 'Oh, there you are... doing that thing you do again'. And so I decided to go away. Become more interesting! Do something else."

During that time she hit the books after enrolling in a college course.

Zellweger, who graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in English in 1991, has never revealed what or where she studied, but she admits she enjoyed being a student.

"I went back to school... (to study) something that I'm fascinated with, as a pedestrian, plebeian observer, and I just wanted to see if I had an aptitude with it, so I went and took... some classes in college," Zellweger told U.S. morning show Live! With Kelly in 2016. "It was great. I got to know my classmates really well. We had lots of fantastic conversations, and I had to study, and that was really interesting, because I wasn't sure if my brain was gonna hold that information at this stage in my life!"