Rachel Weisz (pronounced "vice") is an English actress who was born in London on March 7, 1971. Her Jewish father was born in Hungary, while her mother was born in Vienna, of Austrian, Jewish and one quarter Italian descent.

Weisz read English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. She graduated with a 2:1—2 marks off a first. During her college 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. Her breakthrough role was that of Gilda in Welsh director Sean Mathias's 1995 West End revival of Noël Coward's 1933 play Design for Living at the Gielgud Theatre.

Having already worked for television, Weisz started her cinema career in 1996 with Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty. Since then she has starred in a number of films including The Mummy (1999), About a Boy (2002), and Runaway Jury (2003). In 2001 she returned to the stage to play Evelyn in Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things at the Almeida Theatre (also film).

In 2004, The Constant Gardener was released, a s

ry set in slums in Kibera and Loiyangalani, Kenya. The situation affected the crew to the extent that they set up the Constant Gardener Trust in order to provide basic education around these villages. Weisz is a patron of the charity.

In 2006, Weisz will play Izzi in The Fountain written and directed by fiancé Darren Aro