Weisz up

Refreshingly unpretentious, Oxbridge actress Rachel Weisz combines wit and brains with a luminous screen presence. Now poised to consolidate her success with The Mummy Returns, zshe's edging ever closer to Hollywood's A-list

RACHEL WEISZ skips into the cafe like someone from a Seventies perfume ad, with her belted mac and tweed cap and tumbling raven curls. She's terribly sorry she's late, she made a New Year resolution to be on time for appointments, but she bumped into an old friend and had to have a chat and she knows that some people hate being kept waiting, though she herself doesn't really mind, she quite likes sitting and looking at people, but, um, she's very sorry and anyway would I mind very much if we moved to the back so that she can smoke? I don't mind, and I don't mind her being late. It's only been ten minutes. Compared with most actresses, she's hours early.

But then Rachel Weisz isn't most actresses. One, she's not stupid - she read English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge; two, she's not pretentious - "I don't think actors have any right to grumble about anything," she tells me firmly; three, she's not afraid to make up her own mind about what she likes and dislikes. There can't be many Primrose Hill luvvettes who worship at the altar of Julie Burchill, but Rachel does. "Oh, I love her writing," she grins. "I've read her column, her books, her autobiography. I got into an argument about her the other day. 'Cos she's written some nasty things about friends of mine. But I think she's amazing."

Rachel's vowels can make her sound gushy, but, in truth, she's just enthusiastic. In the hour and a half we spend together, she gets excited about Memphis blues, Gothic architecture, experimental theatre, Marc Almond, Dancer In The Dark, guns, freaks ("dwarves and giants and pinhead ladies"), The Smiths ("I've just discovered them. His lyrics are fantastic. So funny") and the way some people describe every single moment of a journey rather than cutting to the destination ("If you think about it, that's how you should talk about things, because it's the detail that's interesting.") When she was as school, Rachel was constantly sent out of the classroom for being a distraction. "I used to sit second row from the back, and you know when you just start a little seed of unrest and it slowly takes over the whole of the room? I was good at that." I can believe it. Her moods are infectious.

She turned 30 recently and, the day after we meet, she's having a birthday party. The invites are a picture of Elvis (another of her favourites: she sports a necklace with his initials), a picture that, apparently, looks like her. One must assume that it's from The King's pre-chub years: Miss Weisz is stop-the-traffic gorgeous, even more delicate and dewy-eyed in real life than on screen. Anyway, she's looking forward to her do, considering whether to have jelly and ice- cream as well as alcohol.

Rachel is relishing normal life for the moment ("sorting out my knicker drawer"), having filmed three movies back to back during 1999 and 2000; Beautiful Creatures, Enemy At The Gates and The Mummy Returns. This is but a brief pause, though; from late May, she'll be appearing at The Almeida in The Shape of Things, a new play written and directed by Neil "The Company Of Men" LaBute; and she's landed a part in Natural Nylon's film about Christopher Marlowe, which will be starting at the end of summer.

For now, Weisz is keen to talk about her experience in Enemy At The Gates, Jean-Jacques Annaud's recently released Second World War opus which, although critically well received and a hit in the States, has not been quite as commercially successful here. Weisz plays Tania, a volunteer Soviet soldier during the Nazis' siege of Stalingrad caught between the attentions of Vassily (Jude Law), a farm-boy turned super-sniper, and Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), an intellectual political officer.

In the film she goes for Law, as you would, but he is being hunted down by Koenig (Ed Harris), a relentless German crack-shot. The film is a love story within a love triangle within a personal vendetta within one of the most terrible, bloody, defining moments of the 20th century. Annaud himself describes it as "an intimate film at the heart of a battle of epic proportions ... where mundane feelings take the lead in extraordinary situations." It's very long.

Weisz read up for her part and is keen to share her knowledge. "Half a million women fought on the front lines for Russia in the Second World War," she explains, "and they were almost all volunteers. There were so many they had to set up an all-female sniper school, which trained 3000 women. But after the war, instead of being hailed as heroines, because they'd been doing male jobs and having sex with the male soldiers, they were treated as whores."

As a representative of the femo sharp-shooters, Weisz gets to do the requisite nasty with Law, resulting in a surprisingly intimate scene, reminiscent of the infamous sex in Annaud's Name Of The Rose. "Yeah, it's quite good, isn't it?" she smirks. "A bit dirty and furtive." She also, naturally, gets to wave her gun about. This, too, seems to have had its sexual aspect.

"We had this SAS man called Jim who taught us how to use our rifles," she says. "The first day, I said, 'So this is my gun?'" And he went on, 'No, no, this is not a gun, this is a gun', pointing at his cock. He said, 'A gun is for fun, but a rifle's for killing.' And every time I said 'gun', he said 'Uh-uh! Smacky botties!' I don't know," adds Weisz dryly, "if that's very military."

After five months' Berlin bovver-booting, there were just two days off before zipping to Morocco to film The Mummy's sequel. "Mm, yeah, a bit of a crunch of gears," says Weisz. "Straight into a big Hollywood wig." Still, she got to carry on fighting. "We had to learn this Japanese martial art called sai, with these tridents and me and Patricia Velazquez - we had this huge chick fight," reports Weisz.

With her multifarious military techniques, the actress could be perceived as one tough honey. And she is. She doesn't cry often and as a teenager was thrown out of school for being "out of parental control". That was around the time her mother and father were divorcing. "I don't go in for that psycho doo-dah but, yes, my behaviour was probably because my parents were splitting up. I just didn't think that anyone had the right to tell me what to do."

Before then, Weisz, her younger sister Minnie, her Hungarian dad George and her Austrian mother Ruth had all lived together in a semi in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Weisz's room was orange, with a cork floor. Her paternal grandmother ran a jewellery store in Bermondsey market, and the actress's earliest memory is of a brooch her grandma gave her. She buried it under the hedge and never found it again. Weisz's father was an inspector - he came up with a cordless emergency breathing apparatus - and his eldest's first job ambition was to be one too: she spent hours in the shed at the bottom of the garden, with her Chemistry Four set.

"I thought I was Marie Curie, but really I was just using iron filings to make things rust quickly," she says. Weisz is like her father, both in looks and character - he believes in doing things properly, in personal fulfilment and achievement through work.

At one point, I ask Weisz what she thinks about to make herself cry on film, and she's shocked that I assume she's not concentrating: "You do actually really try and imagine that whatever is meant to be happening is happening. Otherwise it's cheating."

It was her "witty, high octane", psychiatrist mum who encouraged Weisz to perform, entering her in modelling competitions when she was barely a teenager. She won one at Harpers & Queen, which indirectly resulted in her being offered a film part at the age of 14 in King David, opposite Richard Gere. "What was my acting experience? I'd played the Princess in The Princess And The Pea in school assembly." Weisz didn't really want to be a film star, and her father certainly didn't like the idea, so she did a couple of news pieces about her not accepting the part and then forgot all about it.

Her school years were not her happiest: she enjoyed her primary years, but went a bit wild before sitting her O levels. She was a rockabilly girl - "red lips, black eye-lines, white face" - and used to dress up in jeans and check shirts, woolly socks and moccasins to go jiving at Twist And Shout at the Camden Palace on a Wednesday. When she was ejected from her fee-paying school, her parents thought it would be good for her to go to a boarding school: a Sloaney establishment in Kent. The other girls had never seen a rockabilly before and Weisz had never been anywhere there were so many bells. "There was a bell that went before the other bell to warn you about the bell that was coming," she smirks.

Her last school, the super-feminist St Paul's, was the one that finally got through to her. She was nearly expelled again, but one English teacher saw some potential, encouraged it, and Rachel ended up at Cambridge where she flourished. She formed an experimental theatre group, called Talking Tongues, with three of her friends and within two years they had won the prestigious Guardian Award in Edinburgh for a self-penned work called Slight Possession. "It was me, this girl Sasha and a stepladder," recalls Weisz.

Since college, she has hardly paused for thought: whizzing through fringe theatre and telly (including Scarlet & Black with Ewan McGregor), breaking into film with Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty in 1996. She's clocked up a few now, including The Land Girls with Anna Friel and Chain Reaction with Keanu Reeves. The Mummy, released in 1999, was what did it for her, though. Some of her friends thought she was selling out by doing such a commercial film, but it has enabled her to pick and choose her roles since.

Weisz's life is changing. Though she isn't often recognised, Enemy At The Gates has changed that and she is edging her way into the A - ist. A few years ago she dated the decidedly low-rent Neil Morrissey. More recently, she came out of a long-term relationship with Sam Mendes, Hollywood's golden boy director.

For the moment, she is happily single. "My step-mother said: 'Darling, you cannot move between men as you do between films.' And I think she's right." Weisz is enjoying life alone, going on road trips with girlfriends, painting her flat, planning her party, having adventures.

I have to say, though, that if I were a man, I wouldn't let her stay solo for long. Phooey to all those spoon-faced It Girls and have- you-met-my-chest presenters. Funny, foxy, clever, going places: Rachel Weisz is the real babe around town The Mummy Returns is out on May 18. Enemy At The Gates is on general release.

Copyright 2001
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