Sex & Relationships

The Oscar-winning actress ventures to the wrong side of the tracks and reveals personal secrets about love, marriage, and discretion

On a bright Indian-summer day in New York City, Rachel Weisz strides up a ramp and into the enormous, gloomy room where we are to have lunch. The sunshine of the day is still on her. It radiates off her dark-brown hair. It lights up her beaming face with its complicated eyes and wide cheekbones. She wears a short gray dress that comes down to midthigh with nothing but bare leg down to a pair of pumps—green, with amoeba-shaped cutouts that look like keyholes.

She's sunny as we exchange effusive greetings, but there is something about Weisz that always provokes a slight double take, something other than her beauty. There are layers of complexity, intelligence, and even ambivalence that suggest secrets, a tiny cloud lingering in the otherwise blue sky.

This mischievous, many-layered vibe—a woman with a past, and a future—is familiar to me from almost all of her movies. But she looks a lot different from when I used to know her in London in the mid-'90s. Her boyfriend at the time was friends with my girlfriend. There were some double dates, some lounging around. At the time, she was appearing in a play, Noel Coward's Design for Living, along with some guy named Clive Owen.

It was her first big part. I can still see her then, stamping her feet as she spoke and moving across the stage in a white, fluffy, tightly belted sweater, her cheeks apple red, everything marvelously bouncing at different speeds. That performance earned her accolades and awards and put her on the map.

Since then, she has starred in blockbusters such as The Mummy and great movies like Enemy at the Gates and Runaway Jury. She is memorable in About a Boy, in which she brings a rather seductive gravitas to Hugh Grant's fumbling toward adulthood, even though she is onscreen for only about eight minutes. In that movie, she plays the right girl, the good girl, as opposed to the wrong, bad girl. But in most of Weisz's performances, she is never totally one thing or another, calm or stormy, day or night. One never seems altogether absent when the other is present. Perhaps it was for this reason that she clicked so well as the outspoken and quite sexy Tessa in The Constant Gardener, for which she won both an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress.

The Rachel Weisz bounding up the ramp to meet me at the restaurant/photo studio must be the daytime version. She is a mother now, settled. Her career seems to have entered a new phase. This month, she appears opposite Ryan Reynolds in the romantic comedy Definitely, Maybe, and in My Blueberry Nights, with Jude Law and Natalie Portman. She finished shooting The Brothers Bloom, opposite Adrien Brody, and is currently shooting The Lovely Bones, directed by Peter Jackson.

That is one kind of busy. Another version is raising the baby she has with her fiancé, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky. She gave birth, in fact, a year after playing the pregnant Tessa in The Constant Gardener.