|
Her comic turn as an adventurous librarian
in the hit movie The Mummy has catapulted Rachel Weisz into the A-list
of Brit actresses in Hollywood. But does she want celebrity? Harriet
Lane meets the screen siren with hippy dreams.
For the past few years, Rachel Weisz has been 'the girl most likely
to'. So far, fate has had other plans. Chain Reaction with Keanu Reeves,
Michael Winterbottom's I Want You, Land Girls with Anna Friel and
Catherine McCormack... duds, all of them. Which is one reason why
Weisz has ended up being better known for having a famous boyfriend
- Neil Morrissey of Men Behaving Badly - than for her acting ability.
It's a shame, because in The Mummy she proves that, as well as being
at home in costume dramas, art-house flicks and action movies, she's
also a dab hand at comedy.
The Mummy is an unutterably silly confection, a crowd-pleasing jumble
of scarab beetles, swashbuckling, sarcophagi and special effects.
A $90-million remake of the 1932 classic starring Boris Karloff, it's
part Indiana Jones, part Carry On Up the Cairo Museum of Antiquities.
In it, Weisz, 29, is splendid as Evelyn, a bespectacled bluestocking
who, when rather tiddly around a camp fire, rises unsteadily to her
feet and declares: 'I... am a librarian!'
She pitches it exactly right. Still, it's a surprising film to find
her in, not least because at the moment Cambridge-educated Weisz is
on the West End stage, winning plaudits for her performance as Catharine
in Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer.
'Evelyn's a good character,' protests Weisz, who liked the script
of The Mummy because it reminded her of Saturday morning TV shows
when she was a kid. 'She's not just the token girl: she has a good,
meaty, feisty role, and I thought the idea of a librarian on an adventure
was funny. It made me laugh.'
In the States, The Mummy shot straight to number one at the box office,
made itself at home there for two weeks, and passed the $100m mark
17 days after its release. Still, Weisz has no plans to push her advantage
in Hollywood. She experimented with LA in 1997, when her then boyfriend
moved there, but hated it. 'I did try. I lasted a month, six weeks,
but I just couldn't do it. I take my hat off to Minnie Driver and
Catherine Zeta-Jones, the girls who go over there and do it. It's
a hard place to be. I just died inside... that sounds very pretentious,
but it was a toxic place.'
No, Weisz is less Beverly Hills than Primrose Hill: self-aware, funny,
direct and dead chuffed with her pancake-flat embroidered slippers
from Joseph ('L30, not bad is it? Though it's ridiculous when you
think of what they cost to make in China'). After filming The Mummy
in Morocco and A Taste of Sunshine in Hungary, she seems happy to
be fiddling around with paint charts and new sofas in her flat in
north London, not far from Hampstead where she grew up.
Educated at Benenden and St Paul's, Weisz, as her surname suggests,
is a product of a background every bit as exotic as her full-blown,
studio-starlet looks. Her father, a medical inventor, comes from a
Jewish Hungarian family; her mother, a psychotherapist, is Catholic
Viennese. They separated when Rachel was 15.
She has a dexterous rebuff to journalists who attempt to investigate
the emotional fallout from the split. Recently, she told an interviewer:
'Coming from a family of millions of shrinks, I'm resistant to you
putting me on the couch about my adolescence, just because I don't
think you'll do it that well.' It's the conversational equivalent
of a big yellow sign marked with a skull and crossbones.
'"She has the kind of face that you just know will help her
to put life together like a string of rare pearls." Such bad
writing, isn't it? Textbook stuff.' Weisz winces as she reads a cutting
from the Daily Mirror which I've brought with me. It's a full-page
feature from May 1984, seemingly written by Humbert Humbert, and the
headline is 'The girl who said no to Richard Gere'.
Weisz was 14 at the time and had started modelling a year earlier,
after her mother, suffering from what her daughter calls 'proud-mum
syndrome', sent a holiday snap to Harpers & Queen.
Casting agents working on the film King David spotted her in the
magazine and offered her a part. 'I wasn't interested in any of it.
I didn't want to be an actress then, or a model,' says Weisz. 'I was
just going to school - I didn't want to do anything that would make
me different, make people at school hate me. At that age, you just
want to fit in and be part of it. I wasn't Shirley Temple, desperate
to act. But I was offered it, and then my parents fell out about it,
and then I didn't do it, and then my mother felt terribly guilty about
it.' In the end, King David bombed, and Weisz's parents went their
separate ways.
Though she was sure she really did want to act from the age of 17,
Rachel wasn't involved in school drama productions. 'I was a bit scared
of it,' she says now. At university, where she read English, she was
similarly hesitant, but finally worked up the nerve and founded a
student theatre group.
In 1992, they took an improvised piece called Slight Possession to
the Edinburgh Festival and, while the show won a Guardian award, Weisz
was approached by a theatrical agent. In 1994, she walked off with
the Critics' Circle award for Best Newcomer for her performance in
Design For Living at the Gielgud. Small surprise, then, that she prefers
stage work to film. 'I'm thinking of doing more theatre. It makes
me very happy. It's more stimulating, more text-based. Film's more
visual: you say your bits and bobs, but that's not so important.'
She remarks that her performance in Suddenly Last Summer is the first
one that her father has admired. 'He's always harsh. He always finds
things he doesn't like.' And yet, since she is tenacious, 'not easily
scared off', she kept asking his opinion. 'It's irresistible in a
way. You just want to hear it, even though you know it will hurt.
He's the one person I can trust. He's really important to me in that
respect.'
Though she says she is ambitious, she adds, 'I'm slightly unsure
as to what my goal is. I just keep doing jobs. Maybe it will decide
itself.' Fame, which is still at arm's length, both fascinates and
horrifies her. 'You have to want it. You're meant to go to a lot of
openings in the Dolce e Gabbana dress, and be photographed doing so.'
She talks about celebrity in terms that remind me of The Lion, The
Witch and the Wardrobe: 'There's something about getting to the other
side and... something will happen; probably nothing... but you imagine
it.' She stops, goes off on a tangent, and then 10 minutes later circles
back to the same point. 'The celebrity thing. I don't want to sound
as if I absolutely don't want it because that's not true. If you're
in the entertainment business, you have to be honest: there's something
alluring about it.'
Her thoughts on the subject have inevitably been focused since she
met Neil Morrissey on the set of My Night With Des. Weisz, who in
anyone's book is a conspicuous-looking creature, says she is entirely
overshadowed by him in public. 'He'll pick me up from the theatre
and we'll try to walk through Leicester Square, and no one's rude,
because he plays a likeable, amiable character, but it's sometimes
a bit difficult if you're trying to get somewhere.
'And girls' She rolls her eyes and laughs, but it sounds a bit forced.
'Women can just be outrageous! We'll be out and they'll just come
up and push themselves on him. Write their numbers down on pieces
of paper and put them in his pocket! I swear to God. I just walk away,
thinking, "Deal with it." I'm not the sort of girl who'd
go: "Hey! That's my ma-an!" I feel invisible.' Which is
odd, because a little later Weisz is explaining one of her favourite
fantasies, which is that she can walk down the street and switch herself
off, like a flashlight. 'When I want,' she says, going a bit red,
'I can disappear. That's obviously completely bonkers. But I also
totally believe it, if you know what I mean.'
One would love to know what Weisz's mother would make of that; and
of the fact that in a parallel universe Weisz would roam the country's
B-roads with a massive brood in tow. 'My real fantasy if I was to
drop out would be to live in a mobile home and be a hippie and drive
around festivals and have millions of children - children with dreadlocks
and nose rings - and play the flute,' she says, with emphasis. Who
knows? She has been on the verge of fame and money for years, but
there's still time for Weisz to be the girl who got it all at one
sitting. If she really wants it.Rachel
WeisZ Personal videos and photos - Click here!
|
