Background and career
Rachel Hannah Weisz (; born 7 March 1970) is a British actress. Known for her performances on stage and screen, she has received several awards, including an Academy Award, an Actor Award, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Laurence Olivier Award.
Weisz began acting in stage and television productions in the early 1990s, and made her film debut in Death Machine (1994). She won a Critics' Circle Theatre Award for her role in the 1994 revival of Noël Coward's play Design for Living, and went on to appear in the 1999 Donmar Warehouse production of Tennessee Williams' drama Suddenly Last Summer. Her film breakthrough came with her starring role as Evelyn Carnahan in the Hollywood action films The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001). Weisz went on to star in several films of the 2000s, including Enemy at the Gates (2001), About a Boy (2002), Runaway Jury (2003), Constantine (2005), The Fountain (2006), Definitely, Maybe (2008), The Lovely Bones (2009) and The Whistleblower (2010).
For her performance as an activist in the 2005 thriller The Constant Gardener, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and for playing Blanche DuBois in a 2009 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, she won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress. In the 2010s, Weisz continued to star in big-budget films such as the action film The Bourne Legacy (2012) and the fantasy film Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) and achieved critical acclaim for her performances in the independent films The Deep Blue Sea (2011), Denial (2016), and The Favourite (2018). For her portrayal of Sarah Churchill in The Favourite, she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role and received a second Academy Award nomination. Weisz portrayed Melina Vostokoff in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Black Widow (2021) and starred as twin obstetricians in the thriller miniseries Dead Ringers (2023).
Weisz was born on 7 March 1970 in Westminster, London, and grew up in Hampstead Garden Suburb. In 1938, before WW2, her parents as children had come to the UK to escape the Nazis. Her father, George Weisz, was a Hungarian Jewish mechanical engineer and inventor known for pioneering a type of ventilator. Her mother, Edith Ruth (née Teich), was a teacher, and later a psychotherapist, originally from Vienna, Austria. Her maternal grandfather's ancestry was Austrian Jewish; her maternal grandmother was Catholic and of Italian ancestry. The scholar and social activist James Parkes helped her mother's family to leave Austria for England. Weisz's mother was raised in the Catholic church and formally converted to Judaism upon marrying Weisz's father. Weisz's maternal grandfather was Alexander Teich, a Jewish activist who had been a secretary of the World Union of Jewish Students.
How Rachel Weisz makes money
She followed this up with the sequel The Mummy Returns in 2001, which grossed an estimated $433 million worldwide, (equivalent to $787 million in 2025 dollars) higher than the original's $260 million (equal to $502 million in 2025 dollars). Box office receipts of $17.5 million made it the second highest grossing Broadway play of 2013.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (2024-10-22), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
