Name: Rachel Weisz (Pronounced Vice)
Birthday: March 7 1971
Birth Place: London, England, U.K.
Height: 173cm (5' 7")
Weight: 54kg (120lb)
Hair Colour: Naturally Brown
Eyes: Green, Hazel
Claim to fame: as Miranda in Stealing Beauty (1996)
Nationality: British
Education: Cambridge University Trinity Hall English Literature
Occupation: Actress

Her comic turn as an adventurous librarian in the hit movie The Mummy has catapulted Rachel Weisz into the A-list of Brit actresses in Hollywood. But does she want celebrity? Harriet Lane meets the screen siren with hippy dreams.

For the past few years, Rachel Weisz has been 'the girl most likely to'. So far, fate has had other plans. Chain Reaction with Keanu Reeves, Michael Winterbottom's I Want You, Land Girls with Anna Friel and Catherine McCormack... duds, all of them. Which is one reason why Weisz has ended up being better known for having a famous boyfriend - Neil Morrissey of Men Behaving Badly - than for her acting ability. It's a shame, because in The Mummy she proves that, as well as being at home in costume dramas, art-house flicks and action movies, she's also a dab hand at comedy.

The Mummy is an unutterably silly confection, a crowd-pleasing jumble of scarab beetles, swashbuckling, sarcophagi and special effects. A $90-million remake of the 1932 classic starring Boris Karloff, it's part Indiana Jones, part Carry On Up the Cairo Museum of Antiquities. In it, Weisz, 29, is splendid as Evelyn, a bespectacled bluestocking who, when rather tiddly around a camp fire, rises unsteadily to her feet and declares: 'I... am a librarian!'

She pitches it exactly right. Still, it's a surprising film to find her in, not least because at the moment Cambridge-educated Weisz is on the West End stage, winning plaudits for her performance as Catharine in Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer.

'Evelyn's a good character,' protests Weisz, who liked the script of The Mummy because it reminded her of Saturday morning TV shows when she was a kid. 'She's not just the token girl: she has a good, meaty, feisty role, and I thought the idea of a librarian on an adventure was funny. It made me laugh.'

In the States, The Mummy shot straight to number one at the box office, made itself at home there for two weeks, and passed the $100m mark 17 days after its release. Still, Weisz has no plans to push her advantage in Hollywood. She experimented with LA in 1997, when her then boyfriend moved there, but hated it. 'I did try. I lasted a month, six weeks, but I just couldn't do it. I take my hat off to Minnie Driver and Catherine Zeta-Jones, the girls who go over there and do it. It's a hard place to be. I just died inside... that sounds very pretentious, but it was a toxic place.'

No, Weisz is less Beverly Hills than Primrose Hill: self-aware, funny, direct and dead chuffed with her pancake-flat embroidered slippers from Joseph ('L30, not bad is it? Though it's ridiculous when you think of what they cost to make in China'). After filming The Mummy in Morocco and A Taste of Sunshine in Hungary, she seems happy to be fiddling around with paint charts and new sofas in her flat in north London, not far from Hampstead where she grew up.

Educated at Benenden and St Paul's, Weisz, as her surname suggests, is a product of a background every bit as exotic as her full-blown, studio-starlet looks. Her father, a medical inventor, comes from a Jewish Hungarian family; her mother, a psychotherapist, is Catholic Viennese. They separated when Rachel was 15.

She has a dexterous rebuff to journalists who attempt to investigate the emotional fallout from the split. Recently, she told an interviewer: 'Coming from a family of millions of shrinks, I'm resistant to you putting me on the couch about my adolescence, just because I don't think you'll do it that well.' It's the conversational equivalent of a big yellow sign marked with a skull and crossbones.

'"She has the kind of face that you just know will help her to put life together like a string of rare pearls." Such bad writing, isn't it? Textbook stuff.' Weisz winces as she reads a cutting from the Daily Mirror which I've brought with me. It's a full-page feature from May 1984, seemingly written by Humbert Humbert, and the headline is 'The girl who said no to Richard Gere'.

Weisz was 14 at the time and had started modelling a year earlier, after her mother, suffering from what her daughter calls 'proud-mum syndrome', sent a holiday snap to Harpers & Queen.

Casting agents working on the film King David spotted her in the magazine and offered her a part. 'I wasn't interested in any of it. I didn't want to be an actress then, or a model,' says Weisz. 'I was just going to school - I didn't want to do anything that would make me different, make people at school hate me. At that age, you just want to fit in and be part of it. I wasn't Shirley Temple, desperate to act. But I was offered it, and then my parents fell out about it, and then I didn't do it, and then my mother felt terribly guilty about it.' In the end, King David bombed, and Weisz's parents went their separate ways.

Though she was sure she really did want to act from the age of 17, Rachel wasn't involved in school drama productions. 'I was a bit scared of it,' she says now. At university, where she read English, she was similarly hesitant, but finally worked up the nerve and founded a student theatre group.

In 1992, they took an improvised piece called Slight Possession to the Edinburgh Festival and, while the show won a Guardian award, Weisz was approached by a theatrical agent. In 1994, she walked off with the Critics' Circle award for Best Newcomer for her performance in Design For Living at the Gielgud. Small surprise, then, that she prefers stage work to film. 'I'm thinking of doing more theatre. It makes me very happy. It's more stimulating, more text-based. Film's more visual: you say your bits and bobs, but that's not so important.'

She remarks that her performance in Suddenly Last Summer is the first one that her father has admired. 'He's always harsh. He always finds things he doesn't like.' And yet, since she is tenacious, 'not easily scared off', she kept asking his opinion. 'It's irresistible in a way. You just want to hear it, even though you know it will hurt. He's the one person I can trust. He's really important to me in that respect.'

Though she says she is ambitious, she adds, 'I'm slightly unsure as to what my goal is. I just keep doing jobs. Maybe it will decide itself.' Fame, which is still at arm's length, both fascinates and horrifies her. 'You have to want it. You're meant to go to a lot of openings in the Dolce e Gabbana dress, and be photographed doing so.'

She talks about celebrity in terms that remind me of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe: 'There's something about getting to the other side and... something will happen; probably nothing... but you imagine it.' She stops, goes off on a tangent, and then 10 minutes later circles back to the same point. 'The celebrity thing. I don't want to sound as if I absolutely don't want it because that's not true. If you're in the entertainment business, you have to be honest: there's something alluring about it.'

Her thoughts on the subject have inevitably been focused since she met Neil Morrissey on the set of My Night With Des. Weisz, who in anyone's book is a conspicuous-looking creature, says she is entirely overshadowed by him in public. 'He'll pick me up from the theatre and we'll try to walk through Leicester Square, and no one's rude, because he plays a likeable, amiable character, but it's sometimes a bit difficult if you're trying to get somewhere.

'And girls' She rolls her eyes and laughs, but it sounds a bit forced. 'Women can just be outrageous! We'll be out and they'll just come up and push themselves on him. Write their numbers down on pieces of paper and put them in his pocket! I swear to God. I just walk away, thinking, "Deal with it." I'm not the sort of girl who'd go: "Hey! That's my ma-an!" I feel invisible.' Which is odd, because a little later Weisz is explaining one of her favourite fantasies, which is that she can walk down the street and switch herself off, like a flashlight. 'When I want,' she says, going a bit red, 'I can disappear. That's obviously completely bonkers. But I also totally believe it, if you know what I mean.'

One would love to know what Weisz's mother would make of that; and of the fact that in a parallel universe Weisz would roam the country's B-roads with a massive brood in tow. 'My real fantasy if I was to drop out would be to live in a mobile home and be a hippie and drive around festivals and have millions of children - children with dreadlocks and nose rings - and play the flute,' she says, with emphasis. Who knows? She has been on the verge of fame and money for years, but there's still time for Weisz to be the girl who got it all at one sitting. If she really wants it.