Rachel Weisz
Biography
Life Story
Rachel Hannah Weisz was born on 7 March, 1970, in London, U.K., to Edith Ruth (Teich), a psychoanalyst, and George Weisz, an inventor. Her parents both came to England around 1938. Her father is a Hungarian Jewish immigrant, and her mother, from Vienna, was of Italian and Austrian Jewish heritage. Rachel has a sister, Minnie, a curator and photographer.
Rachel started modeling 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 Southall's "Washbag". Rachel went on to star on stage in the lauded Sean Mathias revival of Noël 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 Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Rachel has a son with her former partner, director Darren Aronofsky. In June 2011, she married "James Bond" actor Daniel Craig in a private ceremony in New York.
Family
Trivia
She pronounces her last name "Vice."
Studied English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University.
Studying English at Cambridge University, Weisz formed the Talking Tongues theater company and at 1991's Edinburgh Festival won a student drama award for a play she wrote and acted in.
She has recently become a patron of The X Appeal, which is the official charity of the Royal College of Radiologists.
Her father invented respirators that supplied their own oxygen and machines that sense land mines.
1998: Named as one of European films' Shooting Stars by the European Film Promotion Board.
She was awarded the 1994 London Critics Circle Theatre Award (Drama Theatre) for Most Promising Newcomer for her performance in Design for Living.
Educated at the prestigious St Paul's Girls School in London. Was in the same class as actress Emily Mortimer.
Lived in New York with director Darren Aronofsky. [2004]
Ranked #30 in Stuff magazine's 102 Sexiest Women in the World (2002).
Drives an old, black Jaguar 4.2 Sovereign with pepper-pot wheels.
Is the face of Revlon (2005).
When asked who her idols were, she named Gena Rowlands, Katharine Hepburn, Jack Nicholson, Shirley MacLaine, Ingrid Bergman, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.
Has two children - a son Henry Chance Aronofsky (b. May 31, 2006) with her fiancé Darren Aronofsky and a daughter (b. August 2018) with her husband Daniel Craig.
Personal Quotes
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.
