When British actress Rachel Weisz first got noticed 10 years ago in her first smallscale films, including Swept from the Sea, one newspaper described her as "disturbingly exotic", which really meant "she doesn't look British". Despite having long proved her acting chops and winning a best supporting actress Oscar for The Constant Gardener in 2005 people are still bewitched by Weisz's beauty long before she opens her mouth. Cosmetic and fashion companies know this.
She's been hired for Revlon and Burberry campaigns. The London-born actress, 36, can thank her Austrian-Italian psychoanalyst mother and her Hungarian inventor father for her "exotic" looks. While men drool, Weisz is aware that her beauty can intimidate other women.
"If I'm just in dungarees, I don't think I would intimidate anyone," she once said. "If I went out in killer heels and full makeup, blow dry, the whole thing anyone dressed up like that could be intimidating to men and women, really. It's so 'look at me.
' But I love women." And with Weisz to star in Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones, based on the best-selling novel by Alice Sebold, there's the possibility of seeing the beauty up close in Wellington when filming starts in October. Weisz, who studied theatre at Cambridge University, has acted alongside Keanu Reeves, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Jude Law and Ralph Fiennes.
But she is still best known for the two big popcorn hits The Mummy in 1999 and The Mummy Returns in 2001. Weisz is happy juggling serious arthouse-leaning parts such as The Constant Gardener and this year The Colossus, with solid mainstream fare, including About a Boy and Runaway Jury. She has said she'd be happy to star in a third Mummy movie.
Throw in her other diverse films this year, including comedy Fred Claus, romantic comedy Definitely, Maybe and My Blueberry Nights with singer Norah Jones and it's not so surprising that Weisz has also been labelled an "intellectual sex bomb" and "thinking man's totty". Weisz could have hit Hollywood early she was offered a part in Richard Gere's King David when she was 14 but her parents thought she was too young. Instead, she went to Cambridge where she set up her own theatre company.
"We went to the Edinburgh Festival three times. Just me and another girl, Sasha Hales, were the performers," she said in a 2001 interview. "We wrote about eight plays together, we went through the whole gamut of what two people can do onstage with each other.
That was the happiest time of my life creatively." While Weisz later got bigger parts in other people's plays including Noel Coward's Design for Living, which won her a best newcomer award by the London Critics Circle, and then Stealing Beauty in 1996, she struggled to get work after moving to Los Angeles. I was watching so many daytime TV shows.
And then I would get in my car and drive to these auditions listening to the radio. I feel sick now when I listen to the radio." But since hitting the big time, Weisz's personal life has been in the spotlight as often as her films.
She even joked that she once changed lovers as often as film roles. Last year she had a son, Henry Chance, with her fiance American director Darren Aronofksy. Aronofksy, best known for cult movies Pi and Requiem For A Dream, directed Weisz in the critically acclaimed but box office flop The Fountain last year.
She's also dated British director Sam Mendes now married to Kate Winslet and Men Behaving Badly star Neil Morrissey. But don't expect her to want to get noticed in New Zealand. "I wasn't comfortable with the attention while I was in that fairly high-profile relationship," she said later about her relationship with Morrissey.
"Neil embraced the whole gossipy press culture but I didn't." When British actress Rachel Weisz first got noticed 10 years ago in her first smallscale films, including Swept from the Sea, one newspaper described her as "disturbingly exotic", which really meant "she doesn't look British".
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