Rachel Weisz
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Rachel Weisz (born March 7, 1971) is an Academy Award, Golden Globe-winning, British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA)-nominated English actress.
Biography
Early life
Weisz (surname pronounced "vice"); it is a variant spelling of the German word weiss, "white") was born in London, England and grew up in Hampstead. Her father, George Weisz, is a Hungarian-born inventor whose family fled to England to escape Nazi persecution. Her mother, Edith, is a Vienna-born Austrian psychoanalyst and aspiring actress. Weisz's father is Jewish and her mother has been referred to as either Catholic, Jewish, or having Jewish ancestry. Weisz has referred to herself as Jewish.
Weisz was educated at North London Collegiate School, from which she was expelled. She was then sent to Benenden School and eventually settled when she was about 13 in St Paul's Girls' School. She then entered Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, where she graduated with a British undergraduate degree classification of 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.
Career
Her breakthrough role was that of Gilda in Welsh director Sean Mathias's 1995 West End theatre revival of [[Noel Coward's 1933 play Design for Living at the Gielgud Theatre. Having already worked for television, with strong parts in major UK series such as Inspector Morse (1993), Weisz started her cinema career in 1995 with Chain Reaction and then appeared in Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty. She followed this work with more English films including My Summer with Des, 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) and its sequel The Mummy Returns (2001), 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 (also film).
In 2005, Weisz starred in The Constant Gardener, a film adaptation of a John le Carré thriller of the same title set in the slums of Kibera and Loiyangalani, Kenya. For this role, Weisz won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the 2006 Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress and the 2006 Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role. In her home country, she was recognized as a leading role for the film according to the nomination from the BAFTA Film Awards and winnings from the London Film Critics Circle Awards 2005 and British Independent Film Awards.
In 2006, she starred in The Fountain and also provided the voice for Saphira in Eragon. Weisz is in negotiations to return with Brendan Fraser for the third installment of The Mummy trilogy in 2008 or 2009. She is also rumored to be playing the role of Ava Lord in the follow up to 2005's Sin City, Sin City 2, which is slated for a late 2007 release.
Personal life
Weisz is engaged to American film director & filmmaker Darren Aronofsky. They have a son, Henry Chance, born on May 31, 2006. The couple resides in Brooklyn. Weisz previously dated actor Alessandro Nivola, actor Neil Morrissey, and director Sam Mendes
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