Who

British-born Rachel Weisz earned an Oscar for her work in The Constant Gardener, but she frequently finds herself cast in stinkers like The Mummy Returns and Envy. Her fiancé is filmmaker Darren Aronofsky.

Backstory

A Jewish Londoner—she's the daughter of a Hungarian inventor and an Austrian psychoanalyst—Weisz (pronounced "vice") attended Cambridge and started her career on stage in Britain. She earned praise for her performance in BBC miniseries The Scarlet and the Black in 1993, the same year she appeared on stage with Rupert Everett in Design for Living. In 1996, she starred alongside Liv Tyler in Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty; Weisz followed up with the female lead in big-budget 1999 blockbuster The Mummy, which placed her on the Hollywood map. In 2001, she moved to the States and was cast in the WWII thriller Enemy at the Gates and the sequel The Mummy Returns. (Her participation in the latter film makes her partially culpable for launching the film career of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.) She went on to appear opposite Hugh Grant in About A Boy (2002) and alongside John Cusack, Gene Hackman, and Dustin Hoffman in 2003's Runaway Jury.

Of note

Make no mistake: Weisz has made her fair share of lousy movies. In addition to the two Mummy movies (she wisely bowed out of The Rock's star turn in the third installment, The Scorpion King), she's also been an accomplice to such crimes against cinema as the third-rate Ben Stiller/Jack Black comedy Envy (2004) and the third-rate comic book adaptation Constantine (2005), which cast her alongside Keanu Reeves, Shia LaBoeuf, and Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale—not exactly a Murderers Row of acting talent.

But Weisz seems to hope for something more out of her career and lately she's been busy establishing her highbrow bona fides. In 2006 she scored her biggest role to date, in the geopolitical thriller The Constant Gardener, which won her both an Oscar and a Golden Globe. Unfortunately, her next foray into art cinema was less successful: She co-starred in fiancé Darren Aronofsky's sci-fi epic The Fountain, which had nearly collapsed after Brad Pitt pulled out, and underwent a tortuous six-year production process. Aronofsky's and Weisz's artistic lovechild was a notable flop upon its November 2006 release, making back less than a third of its $35 million budget. But she managed to end the year with a nice chunk of change in her bank account anyway, thanks to her appearance in a Burberry ad campaign.

Vice

Weisz smokes a pack of Marlboro Lights a day, a habit she's described as "horribly fun." In her early twenties, she shocked British TV audiences by casually mentioning during an interview that she'd "been smoking too much dope."

Personal

After getting the okay from Weisz's old man, Darren Aronofsky proposed to the actress in Times Square, shortly after they returned from filming The Fountain in Montreal. (She previously dated director Sam Mendes, who is now married to Kate Winslet.) They already have a son, Henry Chance, who was born in 2006. Weisz and Aronofsky divide their time between an apartment in London's Primrose Hill and an apartment on East 11th Street.