Renee ZellwegerRenee Zellweger has revealed she had a breast cancer scare in the late 1990s, just after she hit the big time with Jerry Maguire.

She told Self magazine recently that she found two small lumps in her right breast during a self examination in 1996: “I thought, ‘Oh, I know what you do now. You find out what that is. So I went and found out.

“I was like, ‘Let’s just have it over with. Get in there, stab away, get your little crunchy bit or whatever you’re looking for, put it in the mail and we’ll call it a day.’

“Then I had a weird couple of days waiting for the phone call.”

The biopsy proved to be fibroadenomas, benign breast tumours, which Renee describes as “a fancy word for nothing” but she added that the incident has made her very observant since then: “I pay attention, I do go get my check-ups.”