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Rachel Weisz
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I want you

Up to now, for some reason, Japanese tourists have always mistaken Rachel Weisz for Brooke Shields. But all that's about to change - because suddenly North Londoner Weisz (pronounced 'Vice') is up there with Britain's other female Hollywood power players Kate Winslet and Minnie Driver. Which is just as well, as she says she can't cope with being out of work. 'I'm obsessional,' she says skittishly. 'I want to be working all the time. And I don't think the current description of me as a "shooting star" is very good because a shooting star burns for a second and then burns out - I intend to stick around.'

We first noticed Weisz in the BBC's adaptation of Scarlet And Black, in which her scorching nude scenes with Ewan McGregor caused a bit of a rumpus. Next was Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty in 1996. More recently she was Joseph Conrad's 19th-century heroine Amy Foster, and a Second World War cutie in The Land Girls. In her upcoming film, Going All The Way, she stars with 'It' boy Ben Affleck, and later this month she opens in Michael (Jude) Winterbottom's new film, I Want You.

I Want You is the film we talked about when we met at Shepperton Studios (where she was shooting a very expensive American remake of The Mummy). 'I Want You is an unrelentingly dark film, set in Hastings, about obsessive love,' she explains. 'It's a very open movie with low, low, low-key naturalism - we probably improvised about a third of the dialogue.'

The film got its title from the Elvis Costello song. Her co-star is Alessandro Nivola, 26, an American actor making his name in English films, who plays Martin, a prisoner on release who returns to his coastal home town to find his former love, a hairdresser called Helen (Weisz). 'I actually found the hairdressing quite therapeutic. I went on a course to learn how to shampoo and cut. It's quite intimate touching somebody's head. I now understand why people confess everything to their hairdresser.

'In the relationship between Martin and Helen only bad things can happen. For both of us the characters were a very long way from who we are, so we both sort of had to "go on a journey" for the film.' Their on-screen relationship might have gone from bad to worse, off-screen their relationship became a romance that became a friendship. Since then she has linked up with television's man behaving badly Neil Morrissey, whom she met - guess where - while they were making this summer's football-based love story for the BBC, My Summer With Des. I ask if he was with her on location in the Moroccan desert on The Mummy. 'Bring a boyfriend on location!' she shrieks in amazement. 'You can't do that! "Will you come to the desert with me for six weeks?" You must be crazy.' She laughs a great bubbling gale.

Weisz has an engaging lack of pretension as she bounces around in her chair - and a disarming beauty. Much smaller than the bodacious femme fatale she seems to be on screen, she has that dangerous mix of ravenish darkness and girlish laughter.

She got 'The Call From Hollywood' in 1995 during a rehearsal for The Misanthrope at The Young Vic: Nicole Kidman had dropped out of the new Keanu Reeves vehicle, sci-fi thriller Chain Reaction, and would she like the part? She took the next flight out. As she says: 'In Chain Reaction I didn't have very much to do apart from being pulled around and gawp at Keanu, but it made me another Brit actress prepared to travel.'

And travel she certainly has. Still tanned from Morocco, she was off to Budapest to shoot a Taste Of Sunshine with Ralph Fiennes. 'I love to work abroad. I have no family, no plants, no pets, no responsibilities. I'll happily work either side of the pond but I've just bought a flat in London and I'm definitely not going to be moving to LA. I like to swing from small pictures to big movies. Making films always seems to equal 17-hour days and huge learning curves wherever you are. I'm happy to play any sort of role if the script is good, although I'm not wild about chick parts in Hollywood. I'm not a bimbo.'

London-born Weisz is the daughter of a Jewish refugee from Budapest (an inventor, he devised a pioneering artificial respirator) and a psychoanalyst from Vienna. Both sides of the family fled Fascism in the Thirties before the War. 'My mother used to speak German to my father but now he is remarried and speaks Hungarian at home. I understand German but Hungarian is impossible.' She adds that she has never been conscious of the effects of traumatic displacement, but has a sense of nothing being permanent and feels she can start over and over again.

Her parents divorced when she was 15. Adolescence was not easy, but her mother, the shrink, was against her going into analysis. She said it was better not to know. Brought up in Belsize Park, she was educated at Benenden and St Paul's School for Girls and was to have made her film debut at 14 as Richard Gere's daughter in the best-forgotten King David (especially Gere's dance sequence). But Daddy intervened and, luckily, stalled a false start to her career. She went on to model for Vogue and was an I-D cover-girl at 17 before heading for Trinity College, Cambridge, to read English. There she set up Cambridge Talking Tongues with three friends ('We did two-handers, with 100 mph dialogue and French clowning techniques and ended up covered in bruises') and took plays to the Edinburgh Festival.

'We were described as the "giants of the fringe", which was a bit of a laugh as we were just two smallish barefooted girls wearing floral frocks in an improvised piece named Slight Possession in which we threw each other around the room. You know, fraught naturalism.' Their girlish fraughtness won them a Guardian Fringe Award. 'We were taken to London to the Gate Theatre, which is where I got my agent, which is why I went mainstream and betrayed my avante-garderie. I actually had a place at drama school but at the last moment decided not to go. I started to get television jobs, which at the time seemed amazing but with hindsight were junk. But I'd been in full-time education since I was four. At 22, it was time to start work.'

Her breakthrough came quickly in director Sean Matthias's modernist West End revival of Noel Coward's Design For Living in 1994. It won her the Critics' Circle 'newcomer of the year' award - and both Bertolucci and the producers of Chain Reaction spotted her on stage. 'I have no idea what's in store,' she admits to me. 'If I suddenly got "fame" from a film, for example, such as The Mummy, I suppose I'd just become very good at hiding and wearing wigs. I don't know what I'd do. There's no advice book. Fame is not something you can imagine. I think being on the A-list involves a lot more than just being in a hit movie. It involves going to premieres, lots of dresses, lots of publicity. But, y'know, when I think "A-list", I think why not?'

I Want You opens Friday, 30 October.

Now Playing


ABC Piccadilly Progs 3.50pm 13 Nov to 19 Nov

© Associated Newspapers Ltd., 15 October 1998
This Is London

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