Her father George was a Hungarian inventor responsible for some ground-breaking medical devices

Her father, George, was a Hungarian inventor responsible for some ground-breaking medical devices; her mother, Edith, was a Viennese psychoanalyst. Weisz soon discovered that the best way to unite her warring parents was to become rebellious. Consequently, she was expelled from a series of schools, including North London Collegiate and Benenden, for “disruptive behaviour”. At the age of 13, while at St Paul’s Girls School in London, she was carted off to a child psychiatrist. She later received a letter from her shrink which read: “Congratulations. You are doing very well at keeping your parents together.” Sadly, not well enough. By the time she was 15, they had separated.While Edith, a putative actress, encouraged Rachel to enter the profession, her father discouraged it.

But Weisz was modelling at 14 and was offered a part in King David, starring Richard Gere. Her decision to turn it down seems to have polarised her parents.But the die was cast and at 17 Weisz knew she wanted to act. Acquiescing to her parents’ demand to finish her education first, she spent a summer studying with the theatrical maverick Ken Campbell before going up to Cambridge to study English. She obtained an upper second and the heart of student Ben Miller – later co-star of Armstrong and Miller comedy show – with whom she lived for four years.The student productions in which she involved herself revealed a taste for the unorthodox.

She appeared in Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain and Lorca’s Blood Wedding, and co-founded Talking Tongues, an improvisational theatre group that brought her to the Edinburgh Fringe. There she won a Guardian award for a violent, hugely physical piece of theatre called Slight Possession, in which she and fellow actress Sacha Hails threw each other around the stage and off a stepladder.It impressed director Sean Mathias enough to cast her in his 1994 production of Design For Living, which really got her going. Her vividly sexy performance won her the London Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Newcomer, and she became a poster girl for male theatregoers. Success in theatre and on TV notwithstanding, this was an unhappy time for her; she has described her work in this period as “Crap and more crap. I was crap, it was crap.” Such self-criticism led to a lengthy time in therapy against the express wishes of her mother, who ought to have known what she was talking about.When Hollywood crooked a gilded finger, she willingly followed. Even in second-rate pictures it was clear she could hold the screen against her A-list male stars, whether as action arm candy for Keanu Reeves in Chain Reaction and sassily confident against a comically lecherous Dustin Hoffman in Confidence.”She is too clever not to be aware of the ironies of showbusiness and its inherent silliness,” says the columnist Matthew Norman, who tutored the 15-year-old Weisz in Latin.

“If anyone’s going to win an Oscar and not flirt with being a diva, it’s Rachel She’s got far too developed a sense of irony for that She’s fearsomely bright It’s not in her nature to be troublesome. She is very un-actressy.”To maintain a sense of proportion, she returned to the stage in Britain – gathering wow notices for Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things although she was unable to recapture the performance in the screen version.”As an actress she has the ability to be so committed to what she does,” says Susan Lynch, with whom Weisz starred in Beautiful Creatures. “But at the same time [she can] put it all into a healthy perspective.” Perhaps her greatest asset is her sense of humour. Her feel for comedy emerged in The Mummy and its sequel, in which she appeared as a ditzy librarian who transforms herself into an all-action Lara Croft-style Egyptologist As a result, Playboy offered her a centrefold shoot. She turned it down.Her love life has been well documented, mainly because of the high profile of her boyfriends, and has bestowed upon her a celebrity status that she neither desired nor appreciated. She dated Neil Morrissey after appearing with him in My Summer with Des, and then Sam Mendes, the Donmar theatre supremo-turned-film director.