10. Renée Zellweger // Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001)

Call it a reverse Scarlett O’Hara: instead of being angry that a British actor was playing a Southern character, Bridget Jones’s Diary fans couldn’t imagine the Texas-born Renée Zellweger playing Bridget Jones, who is a modern-day version of Pride & Prejudice's Elizabeth Bennet. (What you can take away from this piece: Batman fans and Jane Austen fans are equally hardcore.) “The criticism has been hurtful,” noted Zellweger in a 2000 interview with The Guardian. “Not the bit about the fact that an American girl is playing this part. I can understand that. But it's the extremes to which it's taken. They'll slip something else in there like, ‘Nobody has even heard of her before;' ‘What's she ever done?;' ‘The unknown Texan comic.’ That's hurtful, d'ya know?” Co-star Hugh Grant came to Zellweger's defense, telling Entertainment Weekly, “She's very funny, and she's been living in England a long time now, mastering the accent. It'll be a triumph. I know it will." The time with a vocal coach—Barbara Berkeley, who worked with Gwyneth Paltrow for Shakespeare In Love—paid off, and Bridget Jones’s Diary became a modern rom-com classic.