Renée Zellweger's House (former)

Renée Zellweger has 2 Academy Awards, for Cold Mountain in 2003 and for playing Judy Garland in Judy. Born in Katy in April 1969 to immigrant parents, she told Vanity Fair she is “the American dream.”

Her father, Emil, was a Swiss engineer in the oil-refining business, and her mother, Kjellfrid, was a Norwegian nurse and midwife who first came to Texas as a governess. They raised her here.

This house falls on the Harris County roll, not the Waller or Fort Bend slice of Katy. Its whole block is a platted run of matched lots, every one on the same residential use code.

Katy sits 25 miles west of downtown Houston and grew up around the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad tracks, finished through here by late 1893. It nearly doubled from 2,923 people in 1970 to 5,660 in 1980.

Rice replaced cotton, peanuts, and corn on the prairie after 1901, and the first well into the Katy gas field went down in 1934. A gas plant doubled the town by 1943.

In 1986 her paper The Karankawas and Their Roots placed 3rd in the Houston Post’s inaugural High School Natural Science Essay Contest. She cheered and played soccer and powderpuff football at Katy High School.

She graduated from Katy High School in 1987 and went on to an English degree at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2016 she came back to the school unannounced, to see her old coaches.