Newton has every reason to be lighthearted about her onscreen romance. Since making her acting debut opposite Nicole Kidman in the 1990 Australian coming-of-age film Flirting, the 27-year-old Brit has shared smooches with such notables as Nick Nolte (in Jefferson in Paris, where her seductive slave Sally Hemings drew criticism) and Brad Pitt (in Interview with the Vampire). But with M:I-2—which earned $71.8 million over the Memorial Day weekend-she is poised to launch to another level. "With her physical gifts and intelligence, she could do whatever she wants," says Edward Saxon, a producer of 1998's Beloved, in which Newton (whose first name is pronounced "Tan-dee") played the title role. "She's a big star, and everyone is about to find out about it." Cruise had an early tip-off. "Nic said, 'You've got to meet this girl—she's really talented,' " recalls the star. "Then we did Interview together and she was perfect. She's got great emotional range."
A good sense of humor too. On the set, reports one M:I-2 crew member, "she was always making us all laugh. She didn't have an actor's attitude." Before the movie's L.A. premiere, Newton relieved the boredom of a pedicure by cracking dirty jokes to amuse her hair and makeup artists. "She has that English-seaside-post-card toilet humor," says her friend British actor Jason Isaacs. "Which is the exact opposite of what you expect from someone who looks like her."
Newton has never fit the Hollywood mold. The daughter of Nick Newton, a British lab technician turned artist, and his wife Nyasha, a Zimbabwean nurse, she was born in Zambia and named Thandiwe, which means, coincidentally, "beloved." When Thandie was 5, the family fled political unrest and returned to Nick's hometown of Penzance, England, where she and her brother James, now 24, were raised. Newton studied ballet at a performing arts high school before injuring her back at age 16, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise: She switched to acting and that same year won a role as an African student who has an affair with a white boy in Flirting.
Before long, Newton, then 17, was caught up in an affair of her own with Flirting director John Duigan, then 40, which she later grew to regret. "It was an exploitative situation," she told the New York Daily News. "Huge games were being played with power." (For his part, Duigan, who also directed her in two later films, says, "There were certainly no hard feelings from my side.")
Her luck changed five years later when she met screenwriter Oliver Parker, 30, at a read-through for his BBC film In Your Dreams. "I was completely and immediately besotted," she told Britain's OK magazine. So, it seems, was Parker, who proposed one year later. Newton, who completed a degree in anthropology at Cambridge while forging her film career, oversaw every detail of their July 1998 wedding day, from the fireworks that exploded over the Thames to the red flip-flops worn by her four bridesmaids. ("They cursed her for them," says best man Isaacs, "because they couldn't dance.")
True to the couple's commitment not to be separated by their careers, Newton passed up a part in Charlie's Angels last year to star in a Parker-written film, It Was an Accident, due out later this year. Meanwhile she's rehearsing for another important role: first-time mom. Six months pregnant, Newton, a voracious reader, has stocked the couple's five-bedroom West London home with baby books. "If the whole acting business goes belly-up," says Isaacs, "she will make a fortune as a pregnancy counselor."
Dan Jewel
Liz Corcoran in London, Michelle Caruso and Ken Baker in Los Angeles and Elizabeth McNeil in New York City
- Contributors:
- Liz Corcoran,
- Michelle Caruso,
- Ken Baker,
- Elizabeth McNeil.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
