 Rachel Weisz biography: Weisz was born in Westminster, England, and grew up in the Hampstead Garden Suburb. Her mother, Edith Ruth (née Teich), is a Vienna-born Austrian teacher turned psychotherapist. Her father, George Weisz, is a Hungarian-born inventor whose family fled to England to escape Nazi persecution. Weisz's father is Ashkenazi Jewish and her mother has been referred to as either Catholic, Jewish, having Jewish ancestry, and being of part Italian descent. Weisz was raised in a cerebral Jewish household and refers to herself as Jewish. Weisz has a sister, Minnie Weisz, who is an artist. Weisz was educated at North London Collegiate School. She was then sent to Benenden School and eventually settled 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. Rachel Weisz was born on 7th March 1971, in London, England, to Edith, an Austrian psychoanalyst and George, a Hungarian inventor. Rachel was a model when she was 14 and began acting during her studies at Cambridge University. While there, she formed a theater company named Talking Tongues, which won the Guardian Award, at the Edinburgh Festival, for its take on 'Neville Shouthall' 's "Washbag". Rachel went on to star on stage in the lauded Sean Mathias revival of Noel Coward's "Design For Living." It was a role that won her a vote for Most Promising Newcomer by the London Critics' Circle. She has starred in many movies, including The Mummy (1999), Enemy at the Gates (2001), and Stealing Beauty (1996). Rachel can also be seen in the movies The Shape of Things (2003), About a Boy (2002), Constantine (2005), and The Constant Gardener (2005), for which she won an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Screen Actor's Guild Award for Best Supporting Actress. Currently, she is living with maverick director Darren Aronofsky in Brooklyn and the two of them have a son, Henry Chance. Rachel Weisz quote: "I found myself a sophisticated, educated American. He's not an actor. He's traveled the world. He knows where Europe is, unlike a lot of Americans. He's very cultured, but he's all man." "You just have to play every scene honestly and forget about a reaction and what the audience is going to think. I think the more seriously you take something, the more funny it might be." "People find out I'm an actress and I see that 'whore' look flicker across their eyes.""I find Hollywood really toxic." "I have absolutely no empathy for camels. I didn't care for being abused in the Middle East by those horrible, horrible, horrible creatures. They don't like people. It's not at all like the relationship between horses and humans." "When I'm playing a character, I use the American accent. But when I go back to England, I just glide right back into Englishness immediately. Every actor uses a dialect coach. Every actor, and if they say they don't, they're lying. Everybody does, yeah. You don't want to worry about it. You have someone listening out to check that you're not straying." ''I'm a bit superstitious about certain things, like what shoes to wear. If I wear the wrong shoes, the whole day may go wrong. Or if I don't get to the bottom of the stairs before the door closes - stupid little things like that. Then I also have all the normal ones, like don't walking under ladders and so on.'' ''God no! I hate it, absolutely hate it. I can't stand it, it's such a drag. So I just tend to wear the same things all the time. I don't like change anyway. - on shoppingI sometimes do worry that actors are people's role models, you know. And doctors and teachers and people doing really important things just get paid nothing. And they put us on the cover of magazines. They should be our heroes. I find it all a bit dubious.I'm not one for parties and stuff like that. I get a bit nervous around lots of people. Being invisible is what I really enjoy. That I find quite entertaining.'' | ||||||||||
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