Rachel Weisz

2008-05-30T07:09:00.001-07:00

Rachel Hannah Weisz is an Academy Award-winning English actress. She became well-known after her roles in the Hollywood films The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, and has since continued appearing in major film roles.
Her breakthrough role was that of Gilda in Welsh director Sean Mathias's 1995 West End revival of Noel Coward's 1933 play Design for Living at the Gielgud Theatre. Having already worked for television, with parts in major UK series such as Inspector Morse (1993), Weisz started her cinema career in 1995 with Chain Reaction and then appeared in Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty. She followed this work with more English films including My Summer with Des, Swept from the Sea, The Land Girls, and Michael Winterbottom's I Want You. Although she received favourable critical recognition for her work to this point, her breakout into wide audience recognition came from a popular serio-comic horror movie The Mummy, in which she played the lead female role. Since then she has starred in a number of films including The Mummy Returns (2001), which grossed higher than the original, as well as Enemy at the Gates (2001), About a Boy (2002), Runaway Jury (2003) and Constantine (2005). Her stage work includes the role of Catherine in a London production of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer and Evelyn in Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things at the Almeida Theatre (also film).
In 2005, Weisz starred in Fernando Meirelles's The Constant Gardener, a film adaptation of a John le Carré thriller of the same title set in the slums of Kibera and Loiyangalani, Kenya. For this role, Weisz won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the 2006 Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and the 2006 Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role. In her home country, she was recognized as a leading role for the film according to the nomination from the BAFTA awards and winnings from the London Critics Circle Film Awards and British Independent Film Awards.
In 2006 Weisz was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The same year, she starred in The Fountain and also provided the voice for Saphira in Eragon. Her upcoming films include the Wong Kar-wai-directed drama My Blueberry Nights (in which she plays an "anti-Southern Belle") and director Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom, in which she plays a wealthy American woman targeted by two con man brothers (Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo). On 7 July 2007, Weisz presented at the American leg of Live Earth.

Drew Barrymore

2008-05-30T07:06:00.001-07:00

Drew Blyth Barrymore (born February 22, 1975) is an Emmy Award- and Golden Globe-nominated American actress and film producer, the youngest member of the Barrymore family of American actors. She has her own production company, Flower Films. Barrymore made her screen début in Altered States (1980); her breakout role two years later was in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. She quickly became one of Hollywood's most recognized child actresses going on to establish herself in mainly comic roles. She has hosted Saturday Night Live 5 times, which places her among Candice Bergen and Bill Murray.Barrymore was born in Culver City, California to American actor John Drew Barrymore and Ildiko Jaid Barrymore (née Makó), an aspiring actress born in a displaced persons camp in Brannenburg, West Germany to Hungarian World War II refugees. Her parents divorced after she was born. She has a half-brother John Blyth Barrymore, also an actor, and two half-sisters, Blyth Dolores Barrymore and Brahma (Jessica) Blyth Barrymore.Barrymore was born into the acting profession, coming from a long line of acting talent stretching back nearly 200 years; her great-great grandparents John Drew, Louisa Lane Drew, her great-grandparents Maurice Barrymore, Georgiana Drew and Maurice Costello, and her grandparents John Barrymore and Dolores Costello were all highly successful actors; John Barrymore was arguably the most acclaimed actor of his generation. She is the grand-niece of Lionel Barrymore, Ethel Barrymore (whom Winston Churchill once proposed to), and Helene Costello, and the great grandniece of John Drew, Jr., actress Louisa Drew, and silent film actor/writer/director Sidney Drew. Her father and half-brother are also actors. She is also the goddaughter of director Steven Spielberg.Her first name, Drew, was the maiden name of her paternal great-grandmother, Georgiana Drew; her middle name, Blyth, was the original surname of the dynasty founded by her great-grandfather, Maurice Barrymore.Barrymore's career began when she was eleven months old, when she auditioned for a dog food commercial. When she was bitten by her canine co-star, the producers were afraid she would cry, but she merely laughed, and was hired for the job. She made her film debut in Altered States (1980). A year later, she landed the role of Gertie in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which made her famous.[1] She received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress in 1984 for her role in Irreconcilable Differences.

hollywood

Rachel Weisz

Drew Barrymore