The beautiful British actress has a four-year-old son called Henry Chance from her relationship with ex-partner Darren Aronofsky.

Rachel admits it can be tough raising a child and having a full-time career simultaneously, although she thinks if she were to work in a different profession it would be harder.

“If I worked in an office or factory my son wouldn’t be able to visit, but Henry comes to see me on set so it’s actually a very good place to be a working mum,” she enthused.

The 40-year-old loves motherhood, although she admits for a long time she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to be a parent or not. It was only when the beauty hit 30 her biological clock began to tick.

“I didn’t know if I wanted to be a mother and then in my thirties I began thinking, ‘Oh actually I do!’” she added.

(Source)

Hailed as a ‘divine being’ by her co-star, this Cambridge-educated actor is as versatile as they come, writes Helen Barlow.

WITH her rosy cheeks, unblemished complexion and an amazing tumble of raven hair, Rachel Weisz doesn’t look anything like 40.

It’s obvious that Weisz looks after herself. Today she seems to have even lost a little weight.

“I don’t have any scales and I still fit into the same old pair of jeans,” she says in her typical matter-of-fact manner. “I eat well, I exercise, but I’m not hysterical about it. I’m just healthy. Being an actor is like being an athlete. I have to be somewhat in shape because this is all I’ve got,” she says raising her hands over her body.

“I probably lost weight carrying my son around. Running after a child is the biggest exercise you can have.”

Weisz has a four-year-old son, Henry Chance, with director Darren Aronofsky. The couple, who announced their split last week, never married, though they had been together nine years. They’d been separated for several months, with rumours circulating that Weisz had fallen for Daniel Craig while they played husband and wife in Jim Sheridan’s movie Dream House in Canada last March.

Weisz and Aronofsky had seemed a successful match. She had moved to New York to be with him in 2001.

The couple had readily combined business with their family life. When Weisz filmed her grand epic, Agora, in Malta, Aronofsky edited his The Wrestler there. “It was bizarre,” she says with a laugh. “One minute we’d be talking about fourth-century Egypt and the next about Mickey Rourke and wrestling.”

Agora, a €50 million ($80 million) Spanish production, which was a hit in Spain last year, has taken its time getting to Australia and has a severely limited release. It’s directed by the Chilean-born Alejandro Amenabar, known for his fine work with actors, including Penelope Cruz in Open Your Eyes, Nicole Kidman in The Others and Javier Bardem in The Sea Inside.

In this fascinating film – an allegory on modern themes such as the divide between science and religion, and religious fundamentalism – the innately poised Brit excels as the Greek philosopher, mathematician and astronomer Hypatia.

A fourth-century trailblazer, Hypatia lived in Alexandria during the Roman Empire and taught at the Platonic school where future leaders were educated. A resolute virgin, she shunned men in her quest for knowledge.

“In this unusual, radical story, Hypatia was killed by fundamentalists in the most brutal way,” Weisz says. “They skinned her alive with oyster shells; they splayed her bones. It’s a fantasy that a slave was in love with her [and strangles her lovingly] as happens in the movie. And we don’t know that she discovered the shape of the Earth or had worked out that the Earth moves around the sun as we show in the movie. We know that she was working on conic sections but unfortunately all of her research was lost.”

The Cambridge-educated Weisz, who played a librarian in The Mummy and its sequel, has struggled to portray ordinary women. As Hypatia she is hardly a damsel in distress. After Hypatia’s father is killed, she takes over the library and vainly attempts to protect its hallowed manuscripts when all hell breaks loose.

“Hypatia was a great teacher, she had very devoted students, Christians and pagans, and she didn’t discriminate which student she would teach in terms of their religion,” Weisz says. “There are fragments, letters from her favourite students, like Synesius [Rupert Evans]. She was the kind of inspirational teacher who could transform your life and it’s true that her students fell in love with her. She gave them a handkerchief with her menstrual blood on it and I think it was her way of saying, ‘Back off! I’m not interested!’ “

The main contender for her affections was Orestes, who went on to become the Prefect of Alexandria. He is played in the film by Oscar Isaac, who won last year’s best supporting actor AFI award for his portrayal of Jose Ramos-Horta in Balibo.

“It’s not hard pining for the divine being that is Rachel Weisz,” the gregarious New York actor says. “I went up to her and said thank you for letting me fall in love with you, even if it was obvious where we had to go.”

Indeed, Weisz says there is little room for love in Hypatia’s life.

“In one scene I’m having a drink with Orestes and he touches me and it looks like it might lead to something,” she says, “but then I look up at the stars and he says something that makes me realise the Earth is not a circle and I rush upstairs. The moment had to be about her moving away from that connection. It has to be about her and her work.”

Even if she does this all-knowing role so well, Weisz says she was uninterested in school and was a truant in her youth. She was more interested in being a tomboy as she grew up near London’s posh Hampstead.

“I was a tree-climber, the best tree-climber in the neighbourhood,” she says. “I was definitely rebellious but I had an amazing English teacher, Miss Gough, who took me under her wing at 16. She believed in me when a lot of the other teachers didn’t. She told me I had a talent that she helped me develop. I went on to study English literature at university.”

Weisz is the eldest daughter of an Austrian psychotherapist mother and a Hungarian medical-inventor father, who fled to Britain during World War II. “Actually [my father] was pretty safe because Hungary didn’t fall until about the last year of the war,” she says. “But he lost a lot of relatives in the Holocaust.”

For the moment Weisz is keeping busy, as is Aronofsky, who has the Oscar-bound Black Swan about to release and will next make Wolverine 2. While the couple, who had filmed The Fountain together, had planned a Jackie Kennedy biopic, that may now not go ahead. In their official statement they state they remain committed to raising their son in New York. Of course that doesn’t mean that Weisz – who has rekindled her love of theatre and last year won a best actress Olivier statuette for her portrayal of Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire at London’s Donmar – will always be in town. She has already agreed to lead a revival of David Hare’s powerful postwar drama Plenty, though that could be staged in New York.

Then there are her movies. Besides Dream House, she has completed The Whistleblower, where she plays a real-life police officer from Nebraska who joins a UN peacekeeping force in Bosnia and uncovers a sex-trafficking operation. She is also working with Terence Davies on a screen adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea and there’s a new film with The Constant Gardner director, Fernando Meirelles.

With Jessica Biel and Eva Mendes, Weisz is even directing a short film for Glamour magazine’s annual Glamour Reel Moments. Clearly she is spreading her wings.

(Source)

Rachel blazes a trail or three

November 17, 2010

Rachel Weisz on her chracter Hypatia in Agora: “They skinned her alive with oyster shells; they splayed her bones. Photo: Getty

Hailed as a ‘divine being’ by her co-star, this Cambridge-educated actor is as versatile as they come, writes Helen Barlow.

WITH her rosy cheeks, unblemished complexion and an amazing tumble of raven hair, Rachel Weisz doesn’t look anything like 40.

It’s obvious that Weisz looks after herself. Today she seems to have even lost a little weight.

“I don’t have any scales and I still fit into the same old pair of jeans,” she says in her typical matter-of-fact manner. “I eat well, I exercise, but I’m not hysterical about it. I’m just healthy. Being an actor is like being an athlete. I have to be somewhat in shape because this is all I’ve got,” she says raising her hands over her body.

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Keeping busy … Rachel Weisz at the Toronto Film Festival.

“I probably lost weight carrying my son around. Running after a child is the biggest exercise you can have.”

Weisz has a four-year-old son, Henry Chance, with director Darren Aronofsky. The couple, who announced their split last week, never married, though they had been together nine years. They’d been separated for several months, with rumours circulating that Weisz had fallen for Daniel Craig while they played husband and wife in Jim Sheridan’s movie Dream House in Canada last March.

Weisz and Aronofsky had seemed a successful match. She had moved to New York to be with him in 2001.

Rachel Weisz thinks her life is like a “fairytale.”

The 40-year-old actress –who recently split from her long-term partner, film director Darren Aronofsky – still loves having to get dressed up for red carpet events and promotional opportunities, and insists no part of her work feels like real life.

She said: “Promoting a movie is part of the job and it’s fiction as much as the movie is.

“It’s like a fairytale. You get lent a dress and someone does your hair, does your make-up, it’s like dressing up and it’s not real – nobody looks like that when they wake up in the morning!

“It’s fantasy, it’s not real life, it’s work and it’s not unpleasant. I like it.”

Despite utilising other people to help recreate the “fairytale “image on the red carpet, Rachel – who has a four-year-old son, Henry, with Darren – makes sure she leads a healthy lifestyle in order to keep her slim figure.

She said: “I’m very healthy. I eat well and exercise. Like being an athlete you have to be somewhat in shape because this is what you have got.”

(Source)

In this month’s much-anticipated film The Lovely Bones, Rachel Weisz plays a mother coming apart at the seams. The British actress knows what those moments feel like, sure, but as she learns to balance her busy career, her family, and some Rachel time, she’s finding that life’s three-ring circus is often much more magical than maddening.

It’s 11 p.m. on a Saturday, and Rachel Weisz has just finished her second mesmerizing and soul-baring three-hour performance of the day, playing Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire at a theater in London’s West End. But before she gets to kick back and fall into the arms of the two men she most cherishes — her son, 3-year-old Henry Chance, and her fiancé, film director Darren Aronofsky, she has one more stop to make. After three standing ovations, the 38-year-old actress dashes out of the theater, jumps into a cab, and heads to a nearby hotel to a clothes fitting for REDBOOK’s cover shoot early the next morning. She obligingly slips in and out of dresses that range from sexy and slinky to pretty and polished and isn’t afraid to say what’s on her mind: “Do I look like a bit of a tramp in this one?” “Is this one too much of a frumpy, buttoned-up mommy look?” This is Rachel: smart, irreverent, passionate, and refreshingly honest — whether she’s talking about fashion or, as I discover a couple of days later, her films and family.

Over tea and sandwiches at a café, our conversation keeps coming back to the struggles and joys of being a working mom. Although Rachel is happier and more content than she’s ever been, she admits that not a day goes by when she’s not trying to figure out how to manage mommyhood, her man, and the work that has made her a star. This month, she appears in one of her most high-profile roles to date, playing Abigail, a mother who falls apart after the tragic murder of her daughter, in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of Alice Sebold’s best-selling 2002 novel — and book-club favorite — The Lovely Bones. “What I like about Abigail is that she isn’t necessarily a heroine,” Rachel says. “She’s struck by tragedy and she just falls apart; there is something so truthful and human to that. It’s funny, because a lot of people thought that Abigail was an unlikable character, but it never even crossed my mind that she was. I’ve always just thought she is human and flawed — not unlike most women.” Read full article.

In the December 2009 issue of Redbook, Rachel Weisz opens up extensively about son Henry Chance, 3, and fiancé Darren Aronofsky.

Although the 39-year-old actress calls motherhood “delicious,” describes Henry as “scrumptious,” and proclaims she’s “never been happier,” she is refreshingly candid about the broad spectrum of emotions that follow the birth of a baby.

“I think one of the things that moms aren’t allowed to talk about enough to one another … is the times when you’re pulling your hair out at home with the kids,” she says.

“Those moments when everything is crashing in and you feel like you’re going to scream.”

Rachel suggests that moms “get together in regular groups” to talk openly about their feelings of frustration, without fear of being judged.

“It doesn’t make us less good or less human, just real,” she adds.

Read full article.

Rachel Weisz doesn’t hide from fans but does seek challenges

No one pesters the slender Oscar winner, who is clad in a simple blue frock and brown gladiator sandals. The women closest to her remain more interested in Manhattan’s ethnic neighborhoods and figuring out how a family of six could cope with such meager accommodations.

So, celebrities can go out in public, bodyguard-free, without being bothered by mobs of fans?

“It’s all a load of (expletive),” Weisz retorts, rolling her eyes. “There’s a few people on the planet for whom it is an issue, but people are not going to attack you. They’re respectful.”

By design, Weisz, 40, flies under the radar. She lives downtown with her partner, director Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler) and their son, Henry, 4. She’s spending the summer at home with her family, mostly indoors these days to escape the heat. “We stay in the air conditioning and do Legos. It’s just too hot out there, isn’t it?”

But she did venture out to check out those historic tenements, something she had long wanted to do.

“I’m not really that into museums. I get quite bored with it. I live in the East Village, so I felt like this is something near there that has history and seemed like something interesting to do,” Weisz says.

The actress concedes she’s no history buff, preferring poetry. But she immersed herself in the past for her most recent role, that of ancient Greek scholar Hypatia in Agora, now in theaters. When director Alejandro Amenábar (The Others) sent Weisz the script, she knew nothing about the character, who lived in fourth-century Egypt and was passionate about studying astronomy and mathematics.

“It seemed very unusual and daring and out of my comfort zone, so I thought, why not?” Weisz says. “She’s willing to die for what she believes in, which I’m not — at all. I’m not noble in any way. The way I figured out I could identify with her is that I’m very, very, very passionate about my work, and so is she. But I also managed to have a relationship and be a mum. I don’t think she had those options open to her.”

When Weisz shot the film in Malta, the family came with her.

“Darren edited The Wrestler and was tinkering with Mickey Rourke, and I was in my toga,” she says.

Does she want to work with Aronofksy again, after he directed her in the 2006 dud The Fountain?

“Yeah, yeah, I’d like to,” Weisz says. “We take turns in terms of filming. Basically, I guess that’s what we do.”

It has been a busy year for Weisz, who nabbed an Oscar for playing a passionate activist in 2005′s The Constant Gardener and most recently was a mother mourning her daughter’s death in last year’s The Lovely Bones. She has wrapped Dream House, a thriller starring her and Daniel Craig as a couple who move into a home where people had been murdered, and the low-budget drama The Whistle-blower, with Weisz uncovering a sex-trafficking scandal in Sarajevo.

Because her family comes first, she’s picky about what movies she takes on. “I’m choosy. It’s a big commitment, doing a job. (Agora) was four months. You have to really want to explore it.”

(Source)

Actress tried romantic comedies, but missed doing meatier roles

By RUTHE STEIN (Source)

After Rachel Weisz had her son four years ago, all she wanted to make was romantic comedies. She sought out a warm and fuzzy professional world to match her personal one. So there she was playing the romantic interest in Definitely, Maybe and The Brothers Bloom.

Then the urge for sweetness and light passed, and Weisz started looking around for meatier projects — more along the lines of The Constant Gardener, for which she won an Oscar for best supporting actress.

One came her way in a script with the oblique title Agora. It tells a fact-based story of the beautiful and brilliant astronomer Hypatia, who lived in fourth century Alexandria. She discovered that the sun was the center of the solar system a millennium before Copernicus did.

Read full article.

Weisz on the role of Hypatia, playing smart chicks, and movie nights at home.

By Wesley Morris (Source)

Once upon a time, modern actresses got to play the great women of the ages in big epics. Elizabeth Taylor was Cleopatra. Anne Baxter was Nefretiri. Katharine Hepburn was Eleanor of Aquitaine. It doesn’t happen so much anymore. But this week the English actor Rachel Weisz nods to somewhat bygone Hollywood tradition. In Alejandro Amenabar’s “Agora,’’ which opens in the Boston area on Friday, she plays the Greek philosopher/astronomer Hypatia, history’s first acknowledged female math geek and a woman caught up in a war among Christians, Pagans, and Jews and two men in love with her. Yes, before there was Bella Swan, a Team Edward, or a Team Jacob, there was Hypatia.

Read full article.

Rachel Weisz says Hollywood has become a “totally different place” in the past few years.

The 40-year-old actress can’t believe how much the movie industry has transformed since the rise of romantic comedies at the turn of the decade. As a dramatic actress, Rachel struggles to find roles in the current climate, and has no idea if things will ever improve.

“Hollywood has changed. It has become a totally different place,” she said. “No one is making dramas anymore and unfortunately, it has really affected the independent market.

“People are not making dramas, and as for dramas with female leads, fucking forget about it. Everyone is having this conversation. All the managers, agents, writers – everyone is saying it.”

Rachel recently played ancient Egyptian goddess Hypatia in historical epic Agora. The film did not receive good reviews, but the star won’t let that colour her opinion of it.

She plans to keep making the movies she likes, regardless of how she thinks it will fare at the box office.

“I do what I can, but there’s only so much I can do,” she explained to Empire magazine. “It’s up to the general public what happens so I don’t pull my hair out – I’m quite practical about it.

“The audience decides, and that’s the way it goes. There’s always an audience for most movies.”

(Source)

SULTRY brunette Rachel Weisz certainly seems the sophisticated type but she’s let slip that underneath her exterior she is no domestic goddess.

The 40-year-old British star of The Mummy, pictured, who has a four year-old son with The Wrestler director partner Darren Aronofsky, admits that she is untidy and hugely disorganised around the house.

“I’m incredibly messy which drives Darren mad,” she says. “There’s always stuff lying around my room everywhere. I try to organise the flat and buy furniture and keep it clean but I’m not very good at it.”

As well as being one of Hollywood’s hottest stars Rachel is also a Cambridge graduate but it seems even she doesn’t have it all.

“I don’t have a good homemaking instinct. I’m working hard on it – especially now I’m a mum. It’s getting a little better but it’s just not me to be honest.”

Won’t that Hollywood salary stretch to a cleaner Rachel?

(Source)