Rachel Weisz

Rachel Weisz has built a career around characters whose intelligence is never merely decorative. Whether she is navigating supernatural adventure, political conspiracy, period intrigue or psychological drama, she brings a searching quality to the screen—a sense that her characters are thinking through the scene even when they are saying very little. Born in Westminster, London, on 7 March 1970, Weisz studied English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where she appeared in student plays and co-founded the all-female drama group Cambridge Talking Tongues. The group won a Guardian Student Drama Award at the 1991 Edinburgh Festival Fringe for Slight Possession, an improvised two-woman piece written by Weisz. Her stage breakthrough followed in the 1994 revival of Noël Coward’s Design for Living, earning her the London Critics’ Circle Award for most promising newcomer. Her international film breakthrough arrived with The Mummy in 1999. As Egyptologist Evelyn Carnahan opposite Brendan Fraser, Weisz found the right balance of curiosity, comedy and adventure, returning for The Mummy Returns in 2001. Yet the role was only one corner of an unusually varied career. She moved between films including Enemy at the Gates, About a Boy, Constantine, The Fountain, The Brothers Bloom, Agora and The Deep Blue Sea without settling into a single screen identity. In Fernando Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener, Weisz played activist Tessa Quayle, a performance that won the Academy Award, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award for supporting actress. Later roles continued to make use of her ability to combine composure with something more volatile underneath. She portrayed historian Deborah Lipstadt in Denial, starred in and produced Disobedience, and played the calculating Lady Sarah Churchill in The Favourite, winning the BAFTA Award for supporting actress and receiving another Academy Award nomination. Weisz has remained active across film, television and theatre. Her work ranges from the Marvel production Black Widow to the dual lead roles of Prime Video’s Dead Ringers, which she also executive produced. That breadth suits her: she is an actor equally comfortable with grand genre machinery and tightly controlled character drama.