H! - Unknown date 2006

CELEBRITY SPOTLIGHT

Rachel Weisz

“The thinking man’s nymph”

It’s Oscars month (the glitzy Los Angeles presentation is on 5 March) and Rachel Weisz is favourite to add an Academy Award to her Golden Globe as best supporting actress in The Constant Gardener.

Sexy and smart, Rachel Weisz has a healthy disdain for the superficialities of stardom. “People find out I’m an actress and I see that ˜whore’ look flicker across their eyes¦ I find Hollywood really toxic.”

As columnist Matthew Norman observed, “She is too clever not to be aware of the ironies of show business and its inherent silliness. If anyone’s going to win an Oscar and not flirt with being a diva, it’s Rachel. She’s got far too developed a sense of irony for that. She’s fearsomely bright.”

Born in London on 7 March 1971 - to an Austrian-Hungarian couple who escaped the imminent Holocaust in the late ˜30s, 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.

Her psychoanalyst mother encouraged her to enter acting, and she was a model at 14 but “ perhaps because her inventor father was less convinced about her aspirations “ she declined to accept a part in King David starring Richard Gere. Shortly after, her parents separated.

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.

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.

She then headed to Hollywood, appearing alongside Keanu Reeves in Chain Reaction and Dustin Hoffman in Confidence. That led to roles “ and international recognition “ in Mummy and its sequel, and an offer by Playboy for a centrefold shot. She declined.

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.

And, in spite of her feelings about Hollywood in general, it could all be quite fun. œYou get your hair and make-up done. You get a beautiful frock. All girls like that. It’s dressing up, fairytale time.

THE REAL RACHEL

¢ 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.”

¢ 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.

¢ Of her fiancé, Darren Aronofsky, she says: “I found myself a sophisticated, educated American. He’s not an actor. He’s travelled the world. He knows where Europe is, unlike a lot of Americans. He’s very cultured, but he’s all man.”

¢ 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.”

A STAR IS BORN

¢ At one time in her career she was touted as the next Helen Mirren “ “the thinking man’s nymph”.

¢ Her movie debit was one line in Death Machine (1995).

¢ Her self-professed idols are: Jack Nicholson, Shirley MacLaine, Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Gene Rowlands, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.

¢ She was chosen as the face of Revlon in 2005.

¢ And her own favourite film of the year? “Probably” The 40 Year Old Virgin, starring Steve Carrell.

“Growing older doesn’t worry me, not at all. I hope I will still be getting jobs when I’m 70. I worry that we are destroying the planet.”

“I’m very wary of talking about statements; I’m a storyteller, an actor, an entertainer”

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