Nurse Betty
2000 film by Neil LaBute
Nurse Betty is a 2000 American black comedy film directed by Neil LaBute and starring Renée Zellweger as the title character, a small town, Kansas waitress who suffers a nervous breakdown after witnessing her husband's torture murder, and starts obsessively pursuing her favorite television soap opera character (Greg Kinnear), while in a fugue state. Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock play the hitmen who killed her husband and subsequently pursue her to Los Angeles.
The film premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival on May 11, 2000. The film was released on September 8, 2000 by USA Films in the United States, with Summit Entertainment releasing in other territories. The film won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Screenplay. For her performance, Zellweger won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. The film was also a commercial success.
Plot
In the small Kansas town of Fair Oaks, diner waitress Betty Sizemore is a fan of the soap opera A Reason to Love. She has no idea that her husband Del, a car salesman, is having a sexual affair with another woman, his secretary. She also doesn't know that her husband supplements his income by selling drugs.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Nurse Betty” is 2000 film by Neil LaBute. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Nurse, Betty and film, not as a finished interpretation.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q431793. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nurse Betty” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.