Renée Zellweger is great as Beatrix Potter, creator of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, and a score of other children's classics. But in person, across the table in a restaurant in Beverly Hills, the actress makes me think less of the late-Victorian artist and naturalist than of Hunca Munca, Tabitha Twitchit, Sir Isaac Newton, and the other animal characters. Zellweger is a slender, wiry little person, with a mobile, expressive mouth like that of Benjamin Bouncer, Potter's pet rabbit, when he was nibbling on a gooseberry. And she has a trick of scrunching up her eyes as if she has just emerged from one of those Beatrix Potter burrows where a grandfather clock tick-tocks beside an old oak dresser full of blue-and-white dishes. She wears no makeup, and her hair looks as though she may or may not have remembered to brush it. As she talks, she reveals that visceral, quicksilver intelligence that is to be found in very good actors. There is no time delay between her thoughts and her skin, senses, nerves, and gestures: She could be taking information about her world through a set of translucent, swiveling ears and some lightly trembling whiskers.

"Down to a Fine Art" has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the February 2007 issue of Vogue.

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