|
|
Rachel Weisz (born March 7, 1971) is an
Academy Award-winning English actress.
Early life: Weisz was born in London, England and
grew up in Hampstead. Her father, George Weisz, is a
Hungarian-born inventor whose family fled to England to
escape Nazi persecution. Her mother, Edith, is a
Vienna-born Austrian psychoanalyst and aspiring actress.
Weisz's father is Jewish and her mother has been
referred to as either Catholic, Jewish, or having Jewish
ancestry. Weisz refers to herself as Jewish.
Weisz was educated at North London Collegiate School,
from which she was expelled. 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.
Career: 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 strong 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 favorable 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. The
film had the eighth-highest domestic gross for the year
and gave her wide exposure to moviegoers in the US and
abroad.
Since then she has starred in a number
of films including The Mummy Returns (2001) (which
grossed higher than the original), 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).
A British actress whose name and dark looks effortlessly
conjure up associations with Eastern European exoticism,
Rachel Weisz first earned the attention of an
international audience with her role as the spoiled
daughter of a sculptor in Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing
Beauty (1996). The daughter of a Jewish-Hungarian
inventor and an Austrian psychoanalyst (both sides of
the family fled Fascist Europe during the '30s), Weisz
was born in London on March 3, 1971. Much of her
adolescence was spent modeling, and after attending
Cambridge to study English, she broke into acting with a
role in Sean Mathias' West End revival of Noel Coward's
Design for Living.
Weisz's performance in the play won her the Critics'
Circle Best Newcomer award, and she subsequently took
advantage of this recognition with a starring role in
the BBC's TV adaptation of Scarlet & Black (1993),
and then in 1996 with her aforementioned part in
Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty. Although most attention
was paid to Liv Tyler in her role as the film's
protagonist, Weisz managed to garner notice of her own,
and this recognition was furthered by her top billing
opposite Keanu Reeves in Chain Reaction that same year.
Unfortunately, the big-budget thriller
was an unmitigated turkey; Weisz followed it with leads
in smaller films such as The Land Girls (1997), a WWII
drama that cast her as a young socialite sent to work on
a farm; and Going All the Way (1997), a post-war
coming-of-age drama starring Ben Affleck and Jeremy
Davies that saw Weisz play Wasp, Affleck's Jewish
girlfriend.
After returning to Britain to star as a hairdresser in
the noirish drama I Want You (1998), Weisz reappeared on
the Hollywood radar as Brendan Fraser's damsel in
distress in the 1999 summer blockbuster The Mummy. That
same year, she played yet another love interest, that of
a womanizing Ralph Fiennes in Sunshine, István Szabó's
epic drama about three generations of a family of
Hungarian Jews. Weisz' subsequent turn in the period
drama Enemy at the Gates (2000) saw her play the
inamorata of yet another Fiennes brother, Joseph. As a
Russian-American sniper caught between the affections of
a Russian party official (Fiennes) and a legendary
sniper (Jude Law), the actress again returned to the
early part of the 20th century (this time the Battle of
Stalingrad) and to the deep end of the Fiennes family
gene pool.
Dutifully returning for The Mummy Returns a few short
months later, that same year found the starlet gaining
positive notice for her role in director Neil LaBute's
biting stage drama The Shape of Things. Cast as a young
art student whose latest "piece" is a
strikingly original form of sculpture, Weisz's character
would attempt to transform her boyfriend from schlub to
stud to surprising effect. When the play was adapted to
film in 2001, the team stuck together with Weisz and
co-star Paul Rudd stepping before LaBute's all-seeing
lens. For her role in the 2003 crime drama Confidence,
Weisz would join a band of talented con artists in a
daring bid to take a banker with ties to organized crime
for all he's worth.
Though the film may not have struck
box-office gold, it did prove something of a sleeper and
drew generally favorable reviews from critics.
Confidence would be one of two films that found Weisz
cast alongside screen legend Dustin Hoffman in 2003, the
other being the courtroom thriller Runaway Jury. If her
last few years had been slightly weighed down in drama,
audiences could be assured that things would lighten up
considerably when Weisz joined the cast of the Barry
Levinson comedy Envy (2004).
In 2005 she starred alongside Keanu Reeves again in the
comic book adaptation Constantine. The dark film about a
man trying to avoid his fate in hell by battling demons
on Earth helped keep Weisz's name in circulation, but
her next project would create the biggest buzz of her
career thus far. Her role in Fernando Meirelles' The
Constant Gardner garnered praise from critics and
audiences alike, winning her an Oscar and a Golden Globe
for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.
Weisz played a British activist working
in Kenya whose investigations into government corruption
cause her to turn up dead, prompting her husband, Ralph
Fiennes, to embark on an epic search to reveal the truth
behind her murder. On the heels of this tremendous
success, she joined the cast of Darren Aronofsky's
psychological science-fiction film The Fountain-a story
spanning a thousand years and exploring issues of love,
death, and spirituality.
In 2005, Weisz starred in The Constant Gardener, a film
adaptation of a John le Carré 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, she starred in The Fountain and also provided
the voice for Saphira in Eragon. She is rumored to be
playing the role of Ava Lord in the sequel to Sin City,
which is slated for a 2008 release.
Personal life: Weisz is engaged to American
filmmaker Darren Aronofsky. They have a son, Henry
Chance, born on May 31, 2006. The couple resides in
Brooklyn. Weisz previously dated actor Alessandro
Nivola, actor Neil Morrissey, and director Sam Mendes. |
|
Find
everything about your favorite celebrities women and
men, official sites, and contact addresses, Browse photo
galleries of famous actors, actresses, models, and other
celebrities. Get the latest on your favorite hottest
actors and acctresses with entertainment news, celebrity
biography, profile, photos, autographs, wallpapers,
quotes, films .. and much more. |
Snoron Celebrities and Models Wallpapers 
