No one takes a picture of you looking shit coming out of your house
No one takes a picture of you looking shit coming out of your house. You just lead your own little life."If so, Weisz's unconscious made its big mistake about a year ago when she started dating Neil Morrissey, her co-star in the BBC film My Summer With Des. The tabloids swooped, with the result that this interview was green-lit only with the proviso that there was to be no interrogation about her "own little life". She seems very keen to stress that the rottweilers are no longer on her case. "They were interested in me for about five minutes, and then they went away and they have never bothered me since It was a few days. It was definitely not nice, but they've gone and forgotten all about me now I wasn't meant for them They really have gone."Maybe 1999 will be her year instead. Of the two films awaiting release, the one that should up her pavement recognition rate is The Mummy, a $90m 1930s Egyptology caper in which she plays a dusty bluestocking who lets her hair down in the Sahara.
The other is Sunshine, directed by the eminent Hungarian auteur Istvan Szabo and starring Ralph Fiennes. But before that her name will be up in lights in the West End when she appears in Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer, which hasn't been performed in London since 1956. She plays Catharine, the role taken by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1959 movie. It's a showy part - Catharine is one diagnosis away from a lobotomy - and will remind West End regulars of what they first saw in Weisz five years ago, when she appeared in a sinuous and frankly lewd production of Noel Coward's Design For Living.Weisz was 22 at the time, with no training behind her.
The previous year she had attended an audition at the Royal Court and was told by a director that "only the truly truly truly great stars will ever make it without training". Sean Mathias, the director of both Design For Living and Suddenly Last Summer, remembers being begged several times by Weisz's agent to let her client audition: "I said, `No way, she's just too inexperienced.' Finally I caved in and said `I'll see her, but she's not going to get the part.' She came to see me and was wearing a long, brown, very sexy, almost see-through dress and no bra. It was a very hot day." Presumably even her unconscious wanted the part.Weisz is probably the brainiest woman ever to have done one of those phwoar shoots in GQ Studying English at Cambridge, "I got very into my work. I got into the whole thing: feminist literary theory, Barthes, Derrida, the whole lot." She considered staying on to do a postgraduate degree.
The Henry James Quarterly wanted to publish her dissertation on Henry James's ghost stories. "It was called `The Pursuit and the Flight of Self and Other: Haunted Fictions'. In The Turn of the Screw I decided the reason why the governess saw ghosts was that she was so lonely she needed to have eyes gazing upon her to feel herself." Not unlike a film star, perhaps. The first time a film audience clapped eyes on Weisz she was draped like a panther along the fringe of a swimming pool in Stealing Beauty. She embodied a certain type of Englishwoman: bored, laconic, plummy, fantastically at ease with herself, jaded with disdain for the foreign surroundings in which she baked her largely naked body.In fact, Weisz is no more English than a meal of goulash and sachertorte.