»(W)RAPPING WITH 'MUMMY' STAR RACHEL WEISZ
LONDON - She may be the passion of the amorous cadaver in "The Mummy," but the exotic Rachel Weisz has suffered more formidable foes.

Her headmistress at a posh private school in her native England was convinced that Weisz would never amount to anything.

"She told me I wasn't allowed to try for college because she didn't think I would get in and thought I was not a good representative of this school," says Weisz, sitting on a frieze couch in a hotel room here.

"This teacher - behind the headmistress' back - took me aside and said, 'I think you have a talent for English and I'll work with you.' She really inspired me and gave me faith in myself."

That effort earned Weisz a place at Cambridge, where she studied English lit and formed an avant-garde theater company.

One of her productions won an award at a theater festival and landed in London. It was there that an agent spied Weisz, who has since starred in movies like "Chain Reaction," "Swept from the Sea" "Land Girls" and "Stealing Beauty."

The trouble was, once she began studying, she became obsessed with it. She quickly turned into a black-saggy-sweater-and-glasses nerd.

"I was so bookish," she says, rolling her eyes. "I really got into it. I was thinking of staying for a Ph.D. But it put me off of acting. I spent three years in analyzing text and doing practical criticism and all that. If you start doing that with your plays and stuff, you act really badly because you have to be quite stupid to act," she says, crossing her legs, and hugging her cream-colored cardigan to her chest.

"You have to turn off your head and use your heart and instinct, definitely," she continues.

"You don't use your intellect at all, that gets in the way. You need instincts and to feel out of control and if you're thinking about things. ..," she shakes her head.

She remains out of control off-screen as well as on. Weisz admits she has great difficulty making decisions. Though she's occupied her London apartment for a year, she still has failed to organize it, "no pictures on the wall."

"I have more problems deciding little things like with a menu, I have a real problem deciding what to eat. It sounds silly but it gets exasperating for those around me. If I see two pens, one with red top and one with blue top, I start to invest great importance in what if I got the red one, what if I got the blue one? It sounds neurotic, and it kind of is. I just waste so much mental space trying to make decisions."

She does the same with clothes.
"I can't get out the door. It's: 'What would happen if I've made the wrong choice?,'" she points to her straight, gray brocade skirt.

"People tell me that's the wrong way to think about it; you can't think like that. It's actually being too controlling about what will happen as a result."

The daughter of a Viennese psychoanalyst and a Hungarian inventor, Weisz says her parents made sure she obtained a college education before she pursued acting. But even as a kid she used to pretend.

"I did have a dressing-up box but it was more in my head. I used to pretend to be different people to myself."

She may think she's given up the academic life, but the bottom line for Weisz is the joy of discovery. "Oftentimes you do learn things from your characters, things you actually want to know," she says.

"Sometimes they're dark things. Sometimes you enter into the psyche of people who've experienced things that you have never experienced before and never will. You learn things about humanity, I think."

For "The Mummy" (opening Friday), Weisz had to learn to ride an anti-social camel, endure 130-degree heat in the Moroccan desert and react to hundreds of special effects and monsters that weren't really there.

But she's doing what she loves, and none of that is as difficult as her first year out of school.
"I was living in a flat with two or three flatmates and none of us had any money. Pasta is what we ate. We ate pasta in the mornings with honey on it, just tons and tons of pasta, with tinned tomatoes on it and this shaky Parmesan on it if we had a little extra money. We'd sit up late at night and plot our careers and our plans."

Right now she's starring in the London theater production of "Suddenly Last Summer." Weisz's boyfriend is British comedian Neil Morissey and someday she'd like to marry and have a family, she says.

In the meantime, her daydreams are still as vivid as when she was a child. "I think everyone has a parallel universe fancy that if I weren't doing this, what would I be doing," she says.

"Mine is, I'd be a gypsy and go around traveling, live in a trailer home and drive around Europe and take it all over the world and have lots of babies and play music and stop somewhere and grow organic vegetables - a hippie alternative life," she grins, a killer smile that could rouse a mummy.