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Rachel Weisz
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My time at Cambridge


-- My time at Cambridge --

Film star Rachel Weisz (Trinity Hall 1987) made her name in Bertolucci and has three new movies out this year. But Cambridge was a bruising experience.

You flex different muscles in student theatre. There were urban myths in Cambridge about power-crazed directors saying 'Be a tomato' or 'Be a tennis ball'. They did put you through the wringer and subject you to more humiliating things than in the outside world. But I guess this was good preparation for the big wide world of acting. We were passionate about it and imagined playing on stages all over the place.

I did hardly any acting at school and I don't come from a theatrical family - my father invents medical equipment. But at Cambridge I felt certain from the start that my acting was something to be continued. I was one of the Saxon girls in the first student production of The Romans in Britain. It's a very violent play and there was a terrible hoo-ha about it. The author, Howard Brenton, came to talk to us and Mary Whitehouse sent some people down to the ADC and tried to ban it.

I had a boyfriend right through my time at Cambridge, Ben Miller, who was at one time president of Footlights. I acted with him in Removal, a play by a friend of mine, David Farr, who's now director of the Gate Theatre. It was a very bad play but it was more pleasant acting with Ben than with a complete stranger. My worst performance was as the bride in Lorca's Blood Wedding: so bad that my parents suggested - only half joking - that I should think of some other profession.

In my second term, four of us started our own theatre company, Cambridge Talking Tongues. There was another actress, Sacha Hails; David Farr was the director and Rose Garnett the producer. We devised six or seven plays with improvisations, writing and performing. At the end, we didn't have anything written down - it was all in our heads. David typed the results out for me as a birthday present. They weren't great text; they were plays about energy and performance. But some of the pieces did have beauty. They were two-handers and we went through the entire gamut of what two people could do on stage. It sounds pretentious, but I'd call them comic-tragic-absurd, in the world of Ionesco. They were very fast - French clowning technique and 100 mph dialogue - and very physical. We ended up covered with bruises.

In Slight Possession, the last of the plays, the third character was a stepladder: we hurled each other off it. I'm very proud of Slight Possession. We devised it in Cambridge but didn't put it on there; we took it to the Edinburgh Festival after Finals and won the Guardian Student Drama Award. We then did it at the Cottesloe in the National Theatre. It was somebody else's set but that didn't matter; all we had to do was climb on the stage and put up our stepladder.

For one of my new films, I Want You, the director, Michael Winterbottom, made us do a lot of improvisation like that. It's rather a dark film, set in Hastings, about obsessive love. I also have lead parts this year in Land Girls - which is a wartime comedy - and Swept from the Sea, which is set in Cornwall and based on Conrad's short story, 'Amy Foster'.

I read English and loved it. There are lots of lawyers at Trinity Hall and law involves a great deal of hard work, so they thought we English students had a very lazy time, lying about and reading Wordsworth. Cambridge English had turned away from Leavis by then, of course; we were all into deconstruction. My tutor was Peter Holland, who is now director of the Shakespeare Centre at Stratford. I was taught by Adrian Poole at Trinity in my third year, and Tim Cribb at Churchill, a great guy, for practical criticism.

I loved supervisions. It's the old cliche: a room with a crackling fire in which clever men and women argue with you - even if they agree - to test your powers of reasoning. People say academics live in an ivory tower. I say good for them!

At one time I was thinking of carrying on to do a doctorate. Undergraduate dissertations are a very good way of getting deeper into a subject. In my second year I did one on Katherine Mansfield, and in my third year I did two more: 'Haunted fiction: the pursuit and flight of the self in Henry James', and 'The politics of space', on women writers in the Deep South. I've still got them.

I managed a First for the dissertations and in my Finals was just two marks off a First: my papers were re-read, which is what they do if you're borderline. But I got a Third on my Tragedy paper! It was nerves. I didn't answer the question, just regurgitated an essay I'd written before. By the last paper, I realised what you had to do, even though it was the Novel paper and I'd read hardly any novels.

Just three weeks before Finals, an ex-Cambridge impresario who had seen a picture of me in the Evening Standard said he wanted me to be in his film about Chekhov. He wined me and dined me at his London club and introduced me to film directors. He then said: 'You might have to leave college without taking Finals'. But I didn't ... and I don't believe the film ever happened.

I had a place at drama school afterwards but at the last moment decided not to go. I started to get television jobs, which at the time seemed amazing but with hindsight were junk. I had been in full-time education since I was four. At twenty it was time to start work.

(c) CAM - Lent 1998
CAM is published by: The University of Cambridge Development Office,
10 Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 1QA, UK
Price: £2.95 (the photograph is worth this amount alone !)


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