Rachel Weisz Biography

Rachel Weisz, pronounced "vice", (born March 7, 1971) is a British actress.

Weisz was born in London to George Weisz (a Hungarian-born Jewish inventor), and Edith (a Catholic psychoanalyst and aspiring actress, who was born in Vienna of Austrian-Jewish and 1/4 Italian ancestry).

Weisz read English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. She graduated with a 2:1—2 marks off a first. During her college 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 Noël Coward's 1933 play Design for Living at the Gielgud Theatre. Having already worked for television, Weisz started her cinema career in 1996 with Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty. She followed this work with more English films including Swept from the Sea, The Land Girls, and Michael Winterbottom's I Want You. Since then she has starred in a number of films including The Mummy (1999), About a Boy (2002), and Runaway Jury (2003). Her stage work includes the role of Catherine in a London production of Tenessee 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 the The Constant Gardener, a film set in the slums of Kibera and Loiyangalani, Kenya. Weisz received a Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe nomination for her performance in the film.

In 2006, Weisz will star in The Fountain, written and directed by her fiancé, Darren Aronofsky. In the same year, she plans to star in a New York production of August Strindberg's Miss Julie, playing the titular role.

Weisz is engaged to the American film director, Darren Aronofsky.