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Thandiwe Newton better known as Thandie Newton (born November 6, 1972) is a BAFTA Award-winning English actress.

Biography

Newton was born in Zambia, to a white English father and a black Zimbabwean mother. According to Newton, her mother is a Zimbabwean Shona Princess.. She was raised in Zambia and Penzance, Cornwall, England, and educated at Downing College, University of Cambridge. Newton made her film debut in Flirting (1991). She had a small role as the Creole slave Yvette in Interview with the Vampire with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt whom she dated during filming.

She gained international recognition opposite Nick Nolte in the Merchant-Ivory production of Jefferson in Paris as Sally Hemmings, which led to her being cast in Jonathan Demme's Beloved (1998), in which she played the title character and costarred with Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey. She played the female lead Nyah Hall in the film Mission: Impossible II with Tom Cruise. When this film went over schedule, she had to pull out of the film Charlie's Angels, and her character ultimately went to Lucy Liu.

Newton recently played Kem, the love interest of Dr. John Carter on the American television series ER.

She also appeared in The Chronicles of Riddick and Crash. Her performance in Crash, as an upper-class light-skinned black woman married to an equally upper-class light-skinned black man and forced to assess her attitudes after being molested by a white police officer (played by Matt Dillon), was honoured with a BAFTA award for Best Supporting Actress in 2006. Crash also won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2005.

Newton married English writer and director Ol Parker in 1998. The couple have two daughters: Ripley, born in 2000, and Nico, born in 2004.

Filmography

• The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) - Linda
• Crash (2004) - Christine
• The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) - Dame Vaako
• Shade (2003) - Tiffany
• The Truth About Charlie (2002, by Jonathan Demme) - Regina Lambert
• It Was an Accident (2000, by Ol Parker) - Noreen Hurlock
• Mission: Impossible II (2000) - Nyah Nordoff-Hall
• Besieged (1998, by Bernardo Bertolucci) - Shandurai
• Beloved (1998, by Jonathan Demme) - Beloved
• In Your Dreams (1997) (TV) - Clare
• Gridlock'd (1997) - Barbara 'Cookie' Cook
• The Leading Man (1996) - Hilary Rule
• The Journey of August King (1995) - Annalees
• Jefferson in Paris (1995, by James Ivory) - Sally Hemings
• Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994) - Yvette
• Loaded (1994) - Zita
• The Young Americans (1993) - Rachael Stevens
• Pirate Prince (1991) (TV) - Becky Newton
• Flirting (1991, by John Duigan) - Thandiwe Adjewa

Trivia

• She was apparently named by her godmother after Jeremy "Pantz" Smith, whose nickname was Thandy.

• The name "Thandiwe" means "beloved" in Ndebele. Newton played a character named "Beloved" in the film adaptation of the Toni Morrison novel Beloved in 1998.

• Her daughter was named in honor of the character Ripley in the Alien films.

• She is friends with Nicole Kidman, who recommended her to her then-husband Tom Cruise as the female lead in Mission: Impossible II.

• She is also extremely close with the powerful British media family the Adams-Taylors; whose eldest daughter, Jessica, is a childhood friend, and godmother to her daughter Ripley.

• In 2006 she contributed a foreword to We Wish: Hopes and Dreams of Cornwall's Children, a book of children's writing published in aid of the NSPCC. In it, she writes vividly about her childhood memories of growing up in Cornwall and the way in which the county's vibrant cultural heritage made it easy for her to "enrich every situation with layers of magic and meaning".

References

External links

• Exclusive Interview: Thandie Newton "The Chronicles of Riddick"
• We Wish: Hopes and Dreams of Cornwall's Children

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