Rachel Weisz Biography, Facts, Personal Life
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Biography for Rachel Weisz, Fact Files
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 Real Name / Birth Name / Full Name / AKA: Rachel Weisz
Date of birth: 7 March 1971
Birthplace (location): London, England, UK
Nickname:
Gender: Female
Occupation: Actress
Nationality: England
Height: 5' 7" (1.70 m)
Weight:
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Executive summary / Best known as: The Constant Gardener
Sometimes Credited As: Kenya Campbell
Family, Parents, Dating:
Father: George Weisz (Hungarian, inventor)
Mother: Edith Ruth Weisz (Austrian, psychoanalyst)
Sister: Minnie Weisz (artist)
Boyfriend: Ben Miller (actor, Armstrong & Miller, b. 1966, cohabited 1991-93)
Boyfriend: Alessandro Nivola (actor, The Clearing, b. 28-Jun-1972, dated in mid-1990s)
Boyfriend: Neil Morrissey (actor, Bob the Builder, b. 4-Jul-1962, dated in 1998)
Boyfriend: Sam Mendes (film director, dated 1999-2002)
Boyfriend: Darren Aronofsky (film director, engaged to be married, dating 2004-)
Education: High School: St. Paul's Girls School, London (1989). University: BA English, Trinity Hall, Cambridge University (1993)
Hobby / Hobbies:
Agencies:
Salary:
Contact, Fan Mailing, Autograph Address of Rachel Weisz:
Mrs. Rachel Weisz
c/o ICM
Oxford House
76 Oxford Street
London
W1N 0AX
UK
Detailed Biography of Rachel Weisz: Full Biography
Rachel Weisz was born in London on 7 March 1971 to an Austrian-Hungarian couple. 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. Rachel is reluctant to talk about being Jewish, explaining that her religion is “very personal”. She does, however, say that growing up was like being in a Woody Allen movie – with lots of jokes about shrinks.
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.
Her psychoanalyst mother encouraged her to enter acting, and she was a model at 14. Before her parents separated, though, Rachel was already working. Edith was ambitious for her and, having wanted to act herself, pushed her daughter in that direction. Sending a holiday snap to Harpers And Queen, she got Rachel a job as a model. Spotted by casting directors, at 14 she was offered a part in Richard Gere's King David but, not wanting her schoolmates to hate her for being different, she turned it down.
Nevertheless, bowing to both their wishes to finish her education, she completed A-levels at St. Paul’s, studied English at Cambridge University – while also becoming involved in student theatre productions – and planned to become a barrister. At Cambridge, she 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.
In 1994, Rachel gained her theatre breakthrough in Design for Living, winning a London Critics’ Circle Award for “most promising newcomer”, but she wasn’t particularly enamoured with her work at the time, spending several years in therapy – oddly, against her mother’s advice.
Weisz started her cinema career in 1995 with Chain Reaction and then appeared 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), Enemy at the Gates (2001), 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.
On the personal front – which she has generally managed to maintain private – she dated Neil Morrissey and Sam Mendes, and is now due to give birth to her first child in May. The father is US independent film director Darren Aronofsky, with whom she has worked on the forthcoming science fiction love epic The Fountain (also starring Hugh Jackman).
In the meantime, she will be treading the red carpet this month as an Oscar nominee for her role in The Constant Gardener (based on the 2000 novel by John Le Carre about the British diplomatic service in Kenya), as a human-rights activist who marries the diplomat character played by Ralph Fiennes.
Notables:
Her movie debit was one line in Death Machine (1995).
She was chosen as the face of Revlon in 2005.
Her self-professed idols are: Jack Nicholson, Shirley MacLaine, Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Gene Rowlands, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.
Her surname is pronounced "Vice" but she isn’t a party animal: "I get a bit nervous around lots of people. Being invisible is what I really enjoy. That I find quite amusing."
Her own favourite film of the year? “Probably” The 40 Year Old Virgin, starring Steve Carrell.
Working in Africa on The Constant Gardener reinforced her social conscience: "I sometimes worry that actors are people’s role models… And doctors and teachers and people doing really important things get paid nothing. They should be our heroes. I find it all a bit dubious.”
She didn’t wear make-up in The Constant Gardener: “It just would have been wrong if she had been an activist with lipstick on. She’s got vanity about her work, not about her appearance."
At one time in her career she was touted as the next Helen Mirren – “the thinking man’s nymph”.
She is superstitious about certain things, like having to wear the right shoes (or "the whole day may go wrong"), and reaching the bottom of the stairs before the door closes.
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