Rachel Weisz

Rachel Weisz Introduction

Rachel Weisz is an Academy Award-winning English actress. She became well known after her roles in the Hollywood films, The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, and has since continued appearing in major film roles that, thankfully, no longer have to do with the Mummy series.

Rachel Weisz Life story

Weisz (pronounced "Vice") was born into a Jewish family and grew up in Hampstead, London. Her mother, Edith Ruth, is a Vienna born Austrian psychotherapist and aspiring actress. Her father, George Weisz, is a Hungarian-born inventor whose family fled to England to escape Nazi persecution. Needless to say, Rachel is not a great fan of Nazis.

During her university years, Weisz 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 Sight Possession. She would receive offers to appear on Who’s Line is it Anyway, until the producers realized that the piece was “not supposed to be funny.”

Her breakthrough role was that of Gilda in the 1995 London revival of Noel Coward’s 1933 play Design for Living at the Gielgud Theatre. As most actresses gracing the West End do, Weisz teamed up with Keanu Reeves for a Hollywood action movie. That movie would be Chain Reaction, and would set off a chain reaction of people leaving theaters en masse. Then she did a bunch of artsy fartsy films with European directors. Hoity toity. Then she broke out as the lead female role in The Mummy. And, just as one is instructed to do on the ride inspired by that film, Rachel “did not look back.” She’s starred in a number of films including The Mummy Returns, Enemy at the Gates, About a Boy, and Constantine. She does stage work too, but you’re probably not reading this for that.

She won a Golden Globe, a SAG Award, and an Academy Award for her role in The Constant Gardener. She was then invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, thereby reducing the average age of members to 112.

Weisz is engaged to American filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, who, it is our fantasy, courted Ms. Weisz with a screening of the infamous “double ended sex toy” scene from Requiem for a Dream. It is also in our fantasy that Ms. Weisz said, after the screening, “You had me at one dildo.”

She can currently be seen starring alongside Jeremy Renner in The Bourne Legacy.