Rachel Weisz

Rachel Hannah Weisz (born 7 March 1970) is a British actress who has built a career across independent films and major blockbusters. Her accolades include an Academy Award, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Laurence Olivier Award.

She started acting on stage and television in the early 1990s, with her first film role in *Death Machine* (1994). In 1994, she won a Critics' Circle Theatre Award for her performance in a revival of Noël Coward’s *Design for Living*, and later appeared in a 1999 Donmar Warehouse production of Tennessee Williams’s *Suddenly Last Summer*. Her big break came playing Evelyn Carnahan in the Hollywood action films *The Mummy* (1999) and *The Mummy Returns* (2001). Throughout the 2000s, she starred in *Enemy at the Gates* (2001), *About a Boy* (2002), *Runaway Jury* (2003), *Constantine* (2005), *The Fountain* (2006), *Definitely, Maybe* (2008), *The Lovely Bones* (2009), and *The Whistleblower* (2010).

For playing an activist in the 2005 thriller *The Constant Gardener*, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Her portrayal of Blanche DuBois in a 2009 revival of *A Streetcar Named Desire* earned her the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress. In the 2010s, she appeared in big-budget films like *The Bourne Legacy* (2012) and *Oz the Great and Powerful* (2013), and earned critical praise for independent films such as *The Deep Blue Sea* (2011), *Denial* (2016), and *The Favourite* (2018). For her role as Sarah Churchill in *The Favourite*, she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role and received a second Academy Award nomination. She played Melina Vostokoff in the Marvel film *Black Widow* (2021) and starred as twin obstetricians in the thriller miniseries *Dead Ringers* (2023).

Weisz was born on 7 March 1970 in Westminster, London, and grew up in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Her parents came to the UK as children in 1938, fleeing the Nazis. Her father, George Weisz, was a Hungarian Jewish mechanical engineer and inventor known for pioneering a type of ventilator. Her mother, Edith Ruth (née Teich), was a teacher and later a psychotherapist, originally from Vienna, Austria. Her maternal grandfather was of Austrian Jewish ancestry; her maternal grandmother was Catholic with Italian ancestry. The scholar and activist James Parkes helped her mother’s family leave Austria for England. Her mother was raised Catholic but converted to Judaism when she married Weisz’s father. Her maternal grandfather, Alexander Teich, was a Jewish activist and secretary of the World Union of Jewish Students. Her younger sister, Minnie Weisz, is a visual artist. Her parents valued the arts and encouraged their children to form opinions through family debates. Weisz left North London Collegiate School, attended Benenden School for a year, and completed her A-levels at St Paul’s Girls School. Known as an “English rose,” she began modelling at 14. In 1984, she gained attention by turning down a role in *King David* opposite Richard Gere. In 1988, she entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, earning a 2:1 in English. There, she was a contemporary of Sacha Baron Cohen, Alexander Armstrong, Emily Maitlis, Sue Perkins, Mel Giedroyc, Richard Osman, and Ben Miller (whom she briefly dated). She acted in student plays and co-founded the all-female drama group Cambridge Talking Tongues. The group won a Guardian Student Drama Award at the 1991 Edinburgh Festival Fringe for *Slight Possession*, an improvised two-woman show she wrote, directed by David Farr. She later trained under master clown Philippe Gaulier at École Philippe Gaulier.

In 1992, she appeared in the television film *Advocates II*, followed by roles in the *Inspector Morse* episode “Twilight of the Gods” and the BBC period drama *Scarlet and Black* alongside Ewan McGregor. *Dirty Something*, a BBC *Screen Two* film made in 1992, was her first film. Her stage breakthrough came as Gilda in Sean Mathias’s 1994 revival of Noël Coward’s *Design for Living* at the Gielgud Theatre, winning the London Critics’ Circle Award for most promising newcomer; one review called her portrayal “wonderful.” Her film career began with a minor role in *Death Machine* (1994), and her first major role was in *Chain Reaction* (1996), which received mostly negative reviews (16% on Rotten Tomatoes) and modest financial success. She then appeared as Miranda Fox in Bernardo Bertolucci’s *Stealing Beauty*, where she was first called an “English rose.” She took roles in the 1997 drama *Swept from the Sea*, the 1998 TV comedy-drama *My Summer with Des*, Michael Winterbottom’s crime film *I Want You*, and David Leland’s *The Land Girls*. In 1999, she played Greta in the historical film *Sunshine*. That same year, her international breakthrough came with *The Mummy*, playing Evelyn Carnahan opposite Brendan Fraser. *Variety* criticised the film’s direction, noting that the actors were directed to broad, undisciplined performances and that buffoonery seemed outside Weisz’s natural range. She followed with the sequel *The Mummy Returns* in 2001, which grossed an estimated sum.