RACHEL WEISZ Biography - Actors and Actresses

 
 

Biography » actors and actresses » rachel weisz

RACHEL WEISZ

Name: Rachel Hannah Weisz                                                                 
Born: 7 March 1970 London, England                                                       
                                                                                         
Rachel Hannah Weisz (born March 7, 1970) is an Academy Award-winning                     
English actress. She became well-known after her roles in the Hollywood films             
The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, and has since continued appearing in major film         
roles.                                                                                   
                                                                                         
Weisz was born in London, England and grew up in the wealthy                             
district of Hampstead. Her mother, Edith Ruth (nee Teich), is a Vienna-born               
Austrian psychotherapist and aspiring actress. Her father, George Weisz, is a             
Hungarian-born inventor whose family fled to England to escape Nazi persecution.         
Weisz's father is Jewish and her mother has been referred to as either Catholic,         
Jewish, or having Jewish ancestry. Weisz was raised in a cerebral                         
Jewish household and refers to herself as Jewish. Weisz has a sister,                     
Minnie Weisz, who is an artist.                                                           
                                                                                         
Weisz was educated at North London Collegiate School. She was then sent to               
Benenden School and eventually settled when she was about 13 in St Paul's Girls'         
School. She then entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where she graduated with a 2:1         
in English. During her university years she appeared in various student                   
productions, co-founding a student drama group called Cambridge Talking Tongues,         
which went on to win a Guardian Student Drama Award at the Edinburgh Festival             
for an improvised piece called Slight Possession.                                         
                                                                                         
Her breakthrough role was that of Gilda in Welsh director Sean Mathias's 1995             
West End revival of Noel Coward's 1933 play Design for Living at the Gielgud             
Theatre. Having already worked for television, with parts in major UK series             
such as Inspector Morse (1993), Weisz started her cinema career in 1995 with             
Chain Reaction and then appeared in Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty. She           
followed this work with more English films including My Summer with Des, Swept           
from the Sea, The Land Girls, and Michael Winterbottom's I Want You. Although             
she received favourable critical recognition for her work to this point, her             
breakout into wide audience recognition came from a popular serio-comic horror           
movie The Mummy, in which she played the lead female role. Since then she has             
starred in a number of films including The Mummy Returns (2001), which grossed           
higher than the original, as well as Enemy at the Gates (2001), About a Boy (2002),       
Runaway Jury (2003) and Constantine (2005). Her stage work includes the role of           
Catherine in a London production of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer and         
Evelyn in Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things at the Almeida Theatre (also film).           
                                                                                         
In 2005, Weisz starred in Fernando Meirelles's The Constant Gardener, a film             
adaptation of a John le Carre thriller of the same title set in the slums of             
Kibera and Loiyangalani, Kenya. For this role, Weisz won the 2006 Academy Award           
for Best Supporting Actress, the 2006 Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting             
Actress and the 2006 Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a           
Female Actor in a Supporting Role. In her home country, she was recognized as a           
leading role for the film according to the nomination from the BAFTA awards and           
winnings from the London Critics Circle Film Awards and British Independent Film         
Awards.                                                                                   
                                                                                         
In 2006 Weisz was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and                 
Sciences. The same year, she starred in The Fountain and also provided the               
voice for Saphira in Eragon. Her upcoming films include the Wong Kar-wai-directed         
drama My Blueberry Nights (in which she plays an "anti-Southern Belle") and               
director Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom, in which she plays a wealthy                 
American woman targeted by two con man brothers (Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo).             
                                                                                         
On 7 July 2007, Weisz presented at the American leg of Live Earth.