Rachel Weisz won an Academy Award for her performance in The Constant Gardener. In Fernando Meirelles' highly acclaimed drama, she played the doomed activist Tessa Quayle. For the performance, she also won the Golden Globe, the London Film Critics Circle Award and the SAG Award.

Born and raised in London, Weisz has also appeared in The Mummy films, About a Boy, Jean-Jacques Annaud's Enemy at the Gates, Beautiful Creatures, Swept from the Sea, and Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty.

Weisz made her London stage debut in Noel Coward's Design for Living, directed by Sean Mathias, for which she received the London Drama Critics Award for Outstanding Newcomer. She reunited with Mathis for the West End production of Suddenly Last Summer. In 2001, she worked with Neil LaBute in London and then off-Broadway in the stage production of The Shape of Things.

Weisz studied English at Cambridge University, where she also co-founded the Talking Tongues Theater Group. The company performed numerous experimental pieces and won the prestigious Guardian Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.