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| Name:Rachel Weisz Life of Rachel: Rachel Weisz was born on 7th March, 1971, in London. The name is pronounced Vice - she actually considered changing it because she was tired of hearing Wheeze and Wise, but quite rightly thought Vice would make her sound like a porn star. Both her parents are Jewish and were brought to England before WW2 to escape the onrushing Holocaust, starting their new lives with nothing. Father George, from Hungary, became an inventor, most notably of medical devices, including a life-saving respiratory machine. Mother Edith, from Vienna, became a psychoanalyst. Rachel also has a younger sister. Throughout Rachel's early life, her parents did not get on too well. Both being fiercely intelligent and highly critical, theirs was a fraught relationship. Rachel - perhaps to gain attention, perhaps to give her parents something to unite over - became rebellious, passing through a series of schools due to her "disruptive behaviour". So, she went from North London Collegiate to Benenden to St Paul's. At 13, her parents took her to a shrink to find the root of these outrages. The shrink sent her a letter saying "Congratulations. You are doing very well at keeping your parents together". Nevertheless, by the time she was 15, they'd separated.By the age of 17, Rachel had decided she wanted to act, but her parents demanded that she finish her education first. At 18, she spent the summer studying with RADA-trained Ken Campbell who she describes as "absolutely bananas, but a visionary". He taught her the power of imagination. She went up to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to study English Literature.At Cambridge, Rachel studied hard. She did dissertations on Katherine Mansfield, Henry James and women writers in the Deep South, eventually ending up by falling a couple of points short of a First Class degree. She'd found love too, spending the last two years of college living with Ben Miller - former president of the famous Footlights club and later the co-star of the outrageous Armstrong & Miller comedy show. She'd stay with Miller for two years after college, too, then leave him. She says she still doesn't know why she did. She thinks maybe it's a longstanding commitment issue - one thing she loves about acting is how actors come together very intensely, then split quite naturally.But Weisz did not need Miller to get things theatrical going. Very quickly she appeared as a Saxon girl in the first student production of The Romans In Britain, a play so violent that Mary Whitehouse sent representatives down to try to have it banned. Next she appeared with Miller in Removal, then came Lorca's Blood Wedding. And then there was Talking Tongues. This was the theatre group that really launched Rachel's career. There were two actors, Rachel and Sacha Hails, with David Farr (later director of the Gate Theatre) as director and Rose Garnett, Rachel's best friend, as producer. Together they performed six or seven improvised pieces - which Rachel described as "comic-tragic-absurd" - characterised by rapid dialogue and French-style clowning. In this, they were not unlike the groups started by Tim Robbins in Los Angeles and John Cusack in Chicago.It was a strange time for Rachel. Before her university finals, she'd been wined and dined by an ex-Cambridge impressario who wanted her to ditch college immediately and star in his movie about Chekhov. She'd turned him down - luckily, as the film was never made. Then, after college, she'd been offered a place at drama school but, thinking she was too old to "carry on being taught stuff", she'd decided to look for work. And now everything was turning out fine and dandy. She was winning awards, getting TV work - it was looking good.As for the TV parts, they had started in 1993 with Dirtysomething. Here Paul Reynolds played a New Age traveller called Dog, with Rachel as girlfriend Becca, a drop-out from Surrey. Deciding to get off the road for winter, they squat with their sidekick Captain Larry, played by Bernard Hill. But a house means responsibility, so Rachel gets a job with flash architect Rufus Sewell and has - shock, horror - a career ahead of her. It was quite a sweet piece, teasing yuppies as well as crusties.But Hollywood will not often be denied, and Rachel returned, as did The Mummy. This time, the action took place in London, 10 years after the original, when Imhotep is exhibited in a museum and is once more awoken. Rachel, now married to Fraser and with an 8-year-old boy, must save the planet from awful beastliness yet again. Really, The Mummy Returns was not a patch on the original. The plot was thin and confused, the special effects were over-ambitious to the point of incompetence, reducing the actors to mere slapstick players. Still, it broke box-office records.It was unsurprising after these two films - her Enemy At The Gates role being fairly unchallenging and The Mummy Returns being rubbish - that Rachel would return to the theatre again. This time it was for The Shape Of Things, by Neil LaBute, playwright and director of the tremendous Nurse Betty. Here Rachel played a bad-assed sculptress, again named Evelyn, who seduces the nerdy Adam in a mid-Western college town. By transforming his looks and boosting his confidence, she inadvertently allows him to approach the wife of his best friend, a woman he was scared to date years before. Couples swap, secrets are revealed, art is questioned, post-modernism is frowned upon, as are superficial things. The play opened at the Almeida, then took off for the Promenade in New York City. And Rachel - angry, artful and intoxicatingly powerful - was wonderful. Two bad things did happen, though. Just before the production, she split from her boyfriend, director Sam Mendes, who'd quickly move on to Kate Winslet. Then, during the London run, she had a day off due to a cold and, on the way back from the doctor's to her Primrose Hill house, her cab was hit by a truck. It was the luckiest of escapes.2002 would bring a welter of releases. There'd be Nick Hornby's About A Boy, where Hugh Grant played an incorrigibly irresponsible bachelor who's shocked to find himself in love with Rachel's beautiful illustrator, and receives advice in life and love from a troubled 12-year-old. Rachel was given very little screen-time to convince us that he couldn't help but love her. A stroll in the park, as it happened.After this came a screen version of The Shape Of Things, and then Confidence. This starred Edward Burns as a con man who scams an accountant, only to find the accountant works for mob boss Dustin Hoffman. Then would come Marlowe, a dirty take on Shakespeare In Love, again with Jude Law. Here Law played playwright Christopher Marlowe, who gets into trouble with the Queen and then has his unpublished plays stolen and given to that whippersnapper Shakespeare. And then she would play Boudicca (formerly Boudicea), 1st Century queen of the Iceni, who attacked the Romans when her daughters were raped, sacking St Albans and marching on London, only to be crushed by the imperial legions. It was said that Rachel turned down $3 million for The Mummy 3, instead taking $140,000 for Marlowe. As quoted earlier, "I'm not a celebrity, I'm an actress". And so, quite clearly, will she remain. Rachel Weisz has said that she would like to possess Katharine Hepburn's "flair for comedy", Bette Davis's "self-dramatising" and Elizabeth Taylor's "burning sensuality" (she played Taylor's role in Suddenly Last Summer). It cannot be denied that she's well on the way. |
| Rachel Weisz Biography |