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.
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.