Rachel Hannah Weisz (born 7 March 1970) is an English actress.

She gained wide public recognition after her portrayal of Evelyn “Evy” Carnahan-O’Connell in the Hollywood films The Mummy and The Mummy Returns. In 2001, she starred opposite Hugh Grant in the hit About a Boy and continued to garner leading roles in Hollywood productions.

Her performance in The Constant Gardener (2005) won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, along with other major motion picture awards.

Early life and background
Weisz was born in Westminster, England, and grew up in the Hampstead Garden Suburb. Her mother, Edith Ruth (née Teich), is a Vienna-born Austrian teacher turned psychotherapist. Her father, George Weisz, is a Hungarian-born inventor whose family fled to England to escape Nazi persecution.

Weisz’s father is Ashkenazi Jewish and her mother has been referred to as either Catholic, Jewish, having Jewish ancestry, and being of part Italian descent. Weisz was raised in a cerebral Jewish household and refers to herself as Jewish. Weisz has a sister, Minnie Weisz, who is an artist.

Weisz was educated at North London Collegiate School. She attended Benenden School and later enrolled in St Paul’s Girls’ School. She then entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where she graduated with a 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

Screen
The same year, she starred in The Fountain and also provided the voice for Saphira in the much-criticized film Eragon. Her 2008 films include the Wong Kar-wai-directed drama My Blueberry Nights (in which she played an “anti-Southern belle”) and director Rian Johnson’s upcoming The Brothers Bloom, in which she plays a wealthy American woman targeted by two con man brothers (Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo). She will also play the lead in the multi-million motion picture Agora, which is currently set to be released in 2009.

Stage
Her breakthrough role was that of Gilda in Welsh director Sean Mathias’s 1995 West End revival of Noel Coward’s 1933 play Design for Living at the Gielgud Theatre. Her other 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) at its, then, temporary location in London’s Kings Cross. In 2009 she will play Blanche DuBois in a Donmar revival of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Other
On 7 July 2007, Weisz presented at the American leg of Live Earth. She is represented by Independent Models in London.