VISITING hospices transformed Rachel Weisz’s latest role, a woman who is dying of cancer, the actress said yesterday.
Weisz, who won an Academy Award for her role in The Constant Gardener last year, said that talking to people who help terminally ill patients to come to terms with death had been a revelation.
“I didn’t know much about the hospice movement,” she said. “I’d met doctors, who do surgery and give drugs. But in hospices they help them die with ease, with massage and music. It was an eye-opener and very enlightening.”
Weisz was speaking at the Venice Film Festival at the world premiere of her new film, The Fountain, a time-travelling tale of love, death and spirituality that spans 1,000 years.
Weisz, 35, who took up acting while studying English at Cambridge University and whose films have included Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty and the blockbuster hit The Mummy, stars opposite the X-Men actor Hugh Jackman.
Advertisement
Jackman plays three men, a warrior, scientist and explorer, bound by an eternal struggle to save the women they love, and come to terms with life, love, death and rebirth. In the three periods, Jackman’s characters are desperately seeking a cure for the cancer that is killing their wives, all played by Weisz.
The actress said that the script was so emotional that she “sobbed like a baby” after reading it, although yesterday’s audience was moved for different reasons and booed after its first screening.
The Fountain is directed and written by her American fiancé, Darren Aronofsky, who said that the man’s love for his wife is so profound that he will do anything to keep her alive. He said: “What he doesn’t realise is that by relentlessly pursuing a way for them to be together forever, he’s actually missing out on her life.”
Aronofsky, who directed the critically acclaimed Requiem for a Dream, had tried to make The Fountain with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett four years ago but had to delay the project. “The desire to live for ever is deep in our culture,” he said. “But we’ve become so preoccupied with sustaining the physical that we often forget to nurture the spirit. So that’s one of the central themes I wanted to deal with in the film.”
Yesterday marked Weisz’s first major public appearance since the birth of her son, Henry, in May.