THE INTERVIEW: Neil's great,; but I'm not ready for; marriage...yet

0 Comments | Sunday Mirror, Jun 6, 1999

They warned me about the bad breath, but even so, I wasn't prepared," says Rachel Weisz, as she pretends to throw up and waves a hand frantically in front of her face.

"It was awful, just the worst thing I've ever smelled," she explains. "Ugh!"

No, she's not talking about Brendan Fraser, her co-star in her new movie The Mummy - a remake of Boris Karloff's horror classic.

She's talking about a camel - a creature she has learned to despise since her encounter with its halitosis.

"I hate them, they're horrible, horrible animals," she says.

Her partner, Neil Morrissey, may wish she was referring to Brendan when talking about that breath, as Rachel has acquired a bit of a reputation for falling for her leading man. She fell for co-star Alessandro Nivola while shooting I Want You in 1997 - "He was my first actor boyfriend, before that I'd been trying to resist it."

It was rumoured that she had been intimate with Keanu Reeves on the cold winter set of Chain Reaction in Chicago, something she denies.

Then of course, there's Neil - they met during the making of BBC television movie My Summer With Des last year.

"It often happens that you do become fictionally infatuated with the actor you're working with. When I played Amy Foster in Swept From The Sea, I was completely infatuated with Vincent Perez," confesses Rachel, 28. And of Brendan Fraser she says: "He's very funny, very easy to get along with - and a great kisser."

But there was no romance there - Brendan married his fiancee right after filming finished.

And while Rachel may be on the brink of Hollywood stardom - The Mummy took pounds 50 million in its first 10 days in America - she's not about drop everything and move to LA to pursue her career. And one reason is Neil.

"I love living in London and, anyway, I've got a boyfriend here," she adds, giving a clue to her depth of feeling for the Men Behaving Badly star, with whom she lives in North London.

"Yeah, he's pretty great.

"I think two actors together can be a recipe for total disaster. But at the same time you do have a shared language and a shorthand."

And the diamond ring on her finger?

"No, it's not a present from Neil. But, yes, I'd like to get married at some point, but I don't feel I'm ready for that sort of commitment right now."

In The Mummy, which opens in cinemas here on June 25, Rachel plays brainy librarian Evelyn Carnahan opposite John Hannah as her twit of a brother and Brendan as the dashing

ex-Legionnaire battling a 3,000-year-old mummy which thinks Rachel's character is his long-lost love.

"The Mummy is not actually such a bad guy, he's a lover," Rachel explains. "I guess 3,000 years is about the longest time I've ever heard of anyone waiting. So it is very romantic.

"What I loved about this script is that this woman has a personality. She is a dizzy librarian who has been reading books all her life, but knows nothing about the ways of the world. She has never even kissed a man. She looks so bookish with her glasses, but then, like Lois Lane in Superman, she takes off the glasses, spins around, the hair comes down and she's a femme fatale."

That she is. Rachel is glorious, sexy and feisty, charging around the desert at full pelt on that camel, and the big movie offers are bound to pour in. But Rachel isn't that thrilled by the impending attention.

"I wouldn't want to be a star," she says. "I just want to carry on being an actress. And if stardom happens along the way, that's fine, but it's not something that I'm striving for.

"I wouldn't really quite know what to do to get it, so it's rather meaningless to me, to be honest."

Rachel grew up in Belsize Park, London "a regular middle class kid". Her mother, Ruth, is a psychoanalyst and her father, George, an inventor.

"I say 'inventor', but it's just what we call him in the family," she laughs. "He's Hungarian with a very thick accent, and he kind of does look like a nutty professor. He began in pneumatics, and then went into medical equipment. He made this pioneering artificial respirator, which is now used in ambulances. It's very compact and you don't need medical training to use it."

Rachel, who made her big screen debut in Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty in 1995, was 17 when she decided she wanted to be an actress.

"You know, I really don't know where the acting comes from. I never had that epiphany at four - 'I want to be an actress!'.

"Then I decided that's what I wanted to do, to go to drama school. But I was brainwashed into thinking I had to get a degree first."

Which she did - studying English at Cambridge University.

"I'm glad now," she adds. "Although I got very bookish. I really got into it and there was a part of me that thought I'd stay and do a Phd.

"But it made me terribly bad at acting. If you spend three hours analysing texts, you lose that spark you need and you start thinking too much.

"You have to be quite stupid to act," she adds. "You have to turn off your head and just use your heart and your gut and your instincts. Any intellect just gets in the way."