Weisz up to a smart babe

She goes for Jude, as you would, but he's being hunted down by Koenig (Ed Harris), a relentless German crack-shot. The film is a love story within a love triangle within a personal vendetta within one of the most terrible, bloody, defining moments of the 20th century. Annaud himself describes it as 'an intimate film at the heart of a battle of epic proportions... [where] everyday mundane feelings take the lead in extraordinary situations'. It's very long.

Rachel read up for her part and is keen to share her knowledge. 'Half a million women fought on the front lines for Russia in the Second World War,' she explains, 'and they were almost all volunteers. There were so many they had to set up an all-female sniper school, which trained 3,000. But after the war, instead of being hailed as heroines, because they'd been doing male jobs and having sex with the male soldiers, they were treated as whores.'

Rachel, as representative of the femo sharp-shooters, gets to do the requisite nasty with Jude, resulting in a surprisingly intimate scene, reminiscent of the infamous sex in Annaud's Name of the Rose.

'Yeah, it's quite good, isn't it?' smirks Rachel. 'A bit dirty and furtive.' She also, naturally, gets to wave her gun about. This, too, seems to have had its sexual aspect.

'We had this SAS man called Jim who taught us how to use our rifles. And the first day, I said, "So this is my gun?" And he went, "No, no, this is not a gun, this is a gun," pointing at his cock. He said, "A gun is for fun, but a rifle's for killing." And every time I said "gun", he said, "Uh-uh! Smacky botties!" I don't know,' adds Rachel drily, 'if that's very military.'

And then, after five months' Berlin bovver-booting, there were just two days off before zipping to Morocco to film The Mummy part deux. 'Mm, yeah, a bit of a crunch of gears. Straight into a big Hollywood wig.' Still, she got to carry on fighting. 'We had to learn this Japanese martial art called sai, with these tridents, and me and Patricia Velazquez, we had this huge chick fight,' reports Rachel, gravely. 'In these Ancient Egyptian bikinis. Spray-painted gold.'

With her multifarious military techniques, Rachel Weisz could be perceived as one tough honey. And she is, actually. She doesn't cry often, and, as a teenager, was chucked out of school for being 'out of parental control'. That was around the time her mum and dad were divorcing. 'I don't go in for that psycho doo-dah but, yes, my behaviour was probably because my parents were splitting up. I just didn't think that anyone had the right to tell me what to do.'

Before then, Rachel, her younger sister Minnie, her Hungarian dad George and her Austrian mother Ruth had all lived together in a semi in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Rachel's room was orange, with a cork floor.

Her paternal grandmother ran a jewellery store in Bermondsey Market and Rachel's earliest memory is of a brooch her grandma gave her. She buried it under the hedge. And never found it again. Rachel's father was an inventor - he came up with a cordless emergency breathing apparatus - and his eldest's first job ambition was to be one too: she spent hours in the shed at the bottom of the garden, with her Chemistry Four set.

'I thought I was Marie Curie, but really I was just using iron filings to make things rust quickly.' Rachel is like her dad, both in looks and character. Mr Weisz believes in doing things properly, in personal fulfilment and achievement through work.

And at one point I ask Rachel what she thinks about to make herself cry on film and she's shocked that I assume she's not concentrating: 'You do actually really try and imagine that whatever is meant to be happening is happening. Otherwise it's cheating.'

It was her 'witty, high octane', psychiatrist mum who encouraged Rachel to perform, entering her in modelling competitions when she was barely a teenager. She won one at Harpers & Queen, which indirectly resulted in her being offered a film part in King David opposite Richard Gere. Aged 14.

'What was my acting experience? I'd played the Princess in The Princess and the Pea in school assembly,' laughs Rachel. She didn't really want to be a film star, and her father certainly didn't like the idea, so she did a couple of news pieces about her not accepting the part, and then forgot all about it.

Her school years were not her happiest: she enjoyed it in the juniors, but went a bit wild before her O levels. She was a rockabilly girl - 'red lips, black eye-liner, white face' - and used to dress up in jeans and check shirts, woolly socks and moccasins to go jiving at 'Twist and Shout' at the Camden Palace on a Wednesday. When she got chucked out of her Edgware fee-payer, her parents thought it would be good for her to go to a boarding school: a Sloaney job, in Kent. The other girls had never seen a rockabilly before and Rachel had never been anywhere where there were so many bells. 'There was a bell that went before the other bell to warn you about the bell that was coming.'

Her last school, the super-femo St Paul's, was the one that finally got through to her. She was nearly expelled again, after the Lower Sixth, but one English teacher saw some potential, encouraged it, and Rachel ended up at Cambridge. Where she flourished. She formed an experimental theatre group, called Talking Tongues, with three of her mates, and within two years they had won the prestigious Guardian Award in Edinburgh, for a self-penned work called Slight Possession. 'It was me, this girl Sasha and a stepladder,' Rachel recalls.

Since college, Rachel has hardly paused for thought: whizzing through fringe theatre and telly (including Scarlet & Black with Ewan McGregor), breaking into film with Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty in 1996.

She's clocked up a few now, including The Land Girls with Anna Friel and Chain Reaction with Keanu Reeves. The Mummy, released in 1999, was what did it for her, though. Some of her friends thought she was selling out by doing such a commercial flick, but it's meant that since then she's been able to do what she pleases.

Rachel's life is changing. Though she isn't, as yet, often recognised, Enemy at the Gates will see to that, plus she's definitely moving up into the A list. A few years ago she dated the decidedly low-rent Neil Morrissey. Now, she's just come out of a long-term relationship with Hollywood's new favourite director, Sam Mendes.

For the moment, she is happily single. 'My step-mother said: "Darling, you cannot move between men as you do between films." And I think she's right.' Rachel Weisz is enjoying life alone, going on road trips with girlfriends, painting her flat, planning her party, having adventures. Good on her.

I have to say, though, that if I were a chap, I wouldn't let her stay solo for long. Phooey to all those spoon-faced It Girls and have-you-met-my-chest presenters. Funny, foxy, clever, going places: Rachel Weisz is the real babe around town.