Rachel Weisz's Real Name: Rachel Hannah Weisz

Quick answer: Rachel Weisz's full name is Rachel Hannah Weisz. She was born on March 7, 1970, in London, England. She acts under her birth name and won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for The Constant Gardener (2005) (Library of Congress; Britannica).

Real name and early life

The Library of Congress name authority files her as "Weisz, Rachel, 1970-." Its citation notes record "b. Rachel Hannah Weisz, Mar. 7, 1970, London" and a birthplace of Westminster, London. One older reference listed 1971, and LOC corrected the year to 1970. Hannah is her middle name, and Weisz is her family surname.

Britannica says she began acting in theater while studying at the University of Cambridge. In the early 1990s she made guest appearances on television, including Scarlet and Black. She first won wide notice in 1994 as Gilda in a West End revival of Noël Coward's Design for Living.

Career highlights

Her film debut was a small role in the horror film Death Machine (1994). She drew critical attention in Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty (1996). American audiences came to know her through The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001). She also kept working on the London stage, with praised performances in Suddenly Last Summer (1999) and The Shape of Things (2001).

Other early-2000s films include Enemy at the Gates, About a Boy, and Runaway Jury. In The Constant Gardener, based on John le Carré's novel, she played activist Tessa Quayle opposite Ralph Fiennes. The role won her the Oscar and, in 2006, a BAFTA Britannia Award. She went on to The Fountain (2006), The Lovely Bones, The Deep Blue Sea (2011; Golden Globe nomination), The Bourne Legacy, Oz the Great and Powerful, The Lobster, Denial, and Disobedience. In The Favourite (2018), with Emma Stone and Olivia Colman, she played a cousin competing for Queen Anne's favor, and she appeared in Marvel's Black Widow (2021).

On stage she won a 2010 Laurence Olivier Award as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. She made her Broadway debut in 2013 in Betrayal opposite her husband, Daniel Craig, whom she married in 2011. She has a son, born in 2006, with director Darren Aronofsky.

Name notes for searchers

Weisz is her family surname, and she has kept it professionally since marrying Daniel Craig in 2011. If you see 1971 given as her birth year, that comes from an older reference. The Library of Congress record now gives March 7, 1970, based on a later source. The spelling is Weisz, not "Weiss."