Rachel Weisz

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Image:Rachel weisz.jpg Rachel Weisz (surname pronounced Template:IPA or "vice") (born 7 March 1971) is an Academy Award-winning English actress.

1 Biography
2 Awards
3 Selected filmography
4 External links
- 4.1 Websites
- 4.2 Interviews

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Biography

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Early life

Weisz was born in London. Her father, George Weisz, is a Hungarian-born Jewish inventor whose family fled to England in order to escape Nazi persecution. Her mother, Edith, is a Vienna-born Austrian Catholic psychoanalyst and aspiring actress of 3/4 Ashkenazi Jewish and 1/4 Italian Catholic heritage. Weisz was raised Jewish.

Weisz read English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. She graduated with a 2:1. 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.

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Career

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 1995 with Chain Reaction, then 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), 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 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 for Best Supporting Actress and the 2006 Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role.

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.

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Personal life

Weisz is engaged to American film director Darren Aronofsky and they are expecting a child in May 2006. Weisz has previously dated actor Alessandro Nivola, actor Neil Morrissey, and director Sam Mendes.[1]

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Awards

Year	Award	Film
2006	Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress - Motion Picture	The Constant Gardener
2006	Screen Actors Guild Award for Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role	The Constant Gardener
2006	Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress	The Constant Gardener

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Selected filmography

Year	Title	Role
2006	The Fountain	Izzi
2005	The Constant Gardener	Tessa Quayle
2005	Constantine	Angela Dodson/Isabel Dodson
2004	Envy	Debbie Dingman
2003	Runaway Jury	Marlee
2003	The Shape of Things	Evelyn Ann Thompson
2003	Confidence	Lily
2002	About A Boy	Rachel
2001	The Mummy Returns	Evelyn Carnahan O'Connell/Princess Nefertiri
2001	Enemy at the Gates	Tania Chernova
2000	Sunshine	Greta
1999	The Mummy	Evelyn Carnahan
1998	Swept from the Sea	Amy Foster