Despite a sensational debut in the West End as a 23-year-old in Noël Coward’s Design for Living, Rachel Weisz’s screen career was stuttering between bridesmaid’s roles – playing second fiddle to the likes of Liv Tyler in Stealing Beauty and Anna Friel in The Land Girls – and a calamitous Hollywood debut, opposite Keanu Reeves in the stinker Chain Reaction. Then she made what amounted to an old-style B-movie, with no stars, a dusty horror premise and few expectations. Sometimes an actor’s big break comes from the most unlikely of sources. Despite a sensational debut in the West End as a 23-year-old in Noël Coward’s Design for Living, Rachel Weisz’s screen career was stuttering between bridesmaid’s roles – playing second fiddle to the likes of Liv Tyler in Stealing Beauty and Anna Friel in The Land Girls – and a calamitous Hollywood debut, opposite Keanu Reeves in the stinker Chain Reaction. Then she made what amounted to an old-style B-movie, with no stars, a dusty horror premise and few expectations.
But what The Mummy lacked in credentials, it more than made up for in spirit and a rampant sense of fun.

The surprise box office hit of 1999, it made a star out of the American Brendan Fraser and gave Weisz the kind of big screen success which, arguably, befits her.There is something intoxicatingly exotic about the 29-year-old, a quality which belongs in the cinema. It has much to do with her roots – father a Hungarian inventor, mother an Austrian psychotherapist – which lend Weisz a pale-skinned, ebony-haired, dark-eyed beauty; of the kind which Beeban Kidron, who directed the actress in the costume melodrama Swept from the Sea, calls “a beauty that you find in film stars of the past”. At the same time, contrarily, Weisz displays an Englishness (she is London-bred, Cambridge-educated) which can seem eccentrically old-fashioned. Many of her roles have played on this, notably the prudish Ag in The Land Girls, and the accident-prone librarian of The Mummy.

Both on screen and, to a degree, in person, Weisz hovers between the demure and the devilish (her name is pronounced “Vice”), the educated and the dippy. Such good-looking ambiguity is worth its weight in gold to a director.Sadly, very few to date have taken advantage. But Bill Eagles, director of her latest film, Beautiful Creatures, at least has the wit to satirise his own superficial use of Weisz’s looks. The film is a reasonably successful variation on Thelma & Louise, with Weisz and the Irish actress Susan Lynch playing two very different women – the former a platinum blonde trophy girlfriend, the latter more independent – who form an unlikely alliance against men.”It’s hard to find one good female part in a film, let alone two,” says the actress, lighting my cigarette as we slouch in a Dorchester suite. “And this is a film about female friendship, without being soppy. People always talk about chemistry with a man – how was your chemistry with Keanu, how’s your chemistry with Jude Law, blah blah. It’s rare, as a woman in a film, to get to play out all your chemistry with another woman.

And Susan is such a fantastic actress.”Considering that actresses have to think about their appearance as a matter of course, becoming a blonde for the duration of the shoot was still an eye-opener “It did make me feel different .. fluffier But more important was how it makes people react to you. With men, it’s like a reflex action – you walk down the street and they swivel They don’t even know they’re doing it. Men just have a thing for blondes.”Her own head seems not to be easily turned, whether by the male gaze (her shoulder-length hair is back to its natural colour), or by the box office kudos of The Mummy, whose sequel appears later this year. “The weird thing is everyone goes ‘Congratulations, congratulations’, and I feel like saying ‘Why?’ It’s not the best work I’ve done, or the best film It’s because it makes dollars.

If that was the criteria by which theatre and new writing was judged, we’d be swimming in shit.”The plus side of something like The Mummy, she says, “is that it gives you so much attention. It shouldn’t be life-changing, but it is; being in something like that means that my presence will help finance something like Beautiful Creatures. And I really want to do things that are truly to my taste.”To which end she cites I Want You, a dark, unfairly unappreciated seaside noir by the Englishman Michael Winterbottom – perhaps the one film which exploited Weisz’s enigmatic quality to the full. “To me it’s the best work I’ve done and the best film that I’ve been in. By a thousand miles,” she says, unbothered by the fact that it left British critics cold. “I think that Michael is the best British director there is.”She’s also proud of the upcoming Enemy at the Gates, an epic about the siege of Stalingrad, in which Weisz co-stars as a Russian sniper alongside Jude Law and Joseph Fiennes “Everyone joined the army in Stalingrad, the women too People were just taught very quickly. Life expectancy was about 12 hours.”She admits to feeling a personal “resonance” in the film’s Second World War setting, derived from her family history: her parents, both with Jewish blood, had to flee their homes (Budapest and Vienna, respectively) before the Nazi invasions – meeting years later, in England, where Rachel was born.