REESE WITHERSPOON

By-the-numbers biography of the A-list actress.

Sirius Satellite Radio producer Brown relies primarily on previous interviews with Reese Witherspoon to gain insight into her career. Cataloguing her work from The Man in the Moon (shot when the actress was 14) through a nude scene in Twilight to her star-making turn in Legally Blonde and Oscar-winning role in Walk the Line, the author doesn’t stray far in style or content from Witherspoon’s IMDb listing. Along the way, Brown also describes Witherspoon’s unremarkable personal life, including her brief time at Stanford University, her marriage to actor Ryan Phillippe, the birth of their two children and her divorce. The author reveals no surprises and takes great pains to paint her subject as a talented and hardworking professional, as devoted to craft as she is to being a traditional southern lady amid the distractions of Hollywood. Brown points out that Witherspoon goes to church and tries to keep her workload to one movie per year in order to spend more time with her children. The most provocative revelation here is that the actress harbors the desire to direct. The very Hollywood prose is innocent of the difference between an adjective and an adverb (at one point Witherspoon and Phillippe are “arguing so loud everyone at the party could hear”), and Brown has an annoying habit of referring to famous people by their first name, even when they’re as peripheral to the narrative as Robert De Niro or Martin Scorsese. The 15-page filmography and awards tally that close the text could serve adequately as an abridged version of the entire book.

This very slight portrait offers little for all but the most devoted, or ill-informed, of Witherspoon’s fans.