Early life
Newton is the daughter of Nyasha, a Zimbabwean health-care worker, and Nick Newton, an English laboratory technician and artist. Her birthplace has been incorrectly reported to be Zambia in biographies, but she has confirmed in interviews that she was born in London, England during a two-week trip there by her parents. The name “Thandiwe” means “beloved” in Ndebele, Zulu, Xhosa or Swazi and the name “Thandie” is pronounced TAN-dee. According to Newton, her mother is a Zimbabwean Shona princess. She was raised in London and Penzance, Cornwall, and studied archaeology and anthropology at Downing College, Cambridge.

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Career
She played the female lead Nyah Hall in Mission: Impossible II, which is one of her most memorable roles. 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.

Personal life
Newton married English writer/director/producer Oliver Parker in 1998. The couple has two daughters: Ripley, born in 2000, and Nico, born in 2004. Her daughters were named after the character Ripley in the Alien films and Nico from Above The Law.

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, a children’s charity that strives to wipe out child abuse. 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.”

Newton swapped her BMW X5 for a Toyota Prius after protesters bombarded the car with eggs at the gates of her daughters’ school. She then wrote to her celebrity friends, asking them to join her in switching to more environmentally friendly cars.

Thandie Newton:
Up-Close-and-Personal

Question: What do you do when you have free time?
Newton: Oh, God. Well, my work takes me away from home a lot. So, I try and spend as much time with my friends as I can, and be there for them when I have time off, and get back involved in my life. We built a house, and I was really involved in all the aspects of home building.

Question: Do you have any hobbies?
Newton: I love to paint and I love carpentry – I love making things. I’m the most unglamorous person [laughing]. If you come to my home, you’d find me in a pair of overalls with a piece of wood and a piece of sand paper making something. That’s when I feel most happy, actually, making things.

Question: What was your favourite vacation?
Newton: My favourite vacation was, without a doubt, my honeymoon. My husband and I flew into Bilbao in Spain, and drove down through the north of Spain along the coast of Portugal, the edge of Portugal, and ended up in Madrid. We only managed to do the first half, we wanted to go all the way down to the south, but I had to do some work. It was the most amazing two weeks of my life.

Question: Did you see the Guggenheim?
Newton: No, we didn’t stop there, we wanted to go on and start our
romantic stuff.

Question: Has being a mother changed the amount of work that you’re willing to do each year?
Newton: It makes me comfortable with only doing a film a year, lets say. In the past, I used to think, ‘Maybe I should be doing more.’ It’s kind of hard work on so many different levels and you earn enough money that you don’t have to work all the time, and I thought that was pretty great, but then, you see other people knowing what they’re going to be doing for the next, you know, 12 months. I’ve never been like that, really. I’ve always been too preoccupied with my personal life, I think, and now, it has to be worth not leaving my kids.

Question: You live in London. Ever get the urge to move to Hollywood?
Newton: Sometimes I think that I should move there because it’s so sunny and nice, and it’s actually really good for little kids. There’s a lot here … my family and my brother. I have great friends here too, but I think that I’d be scared from what I know, and I think that London is a great place to be. It’s a little bit on top of you, you feel quite crowded by it, but since we bought a house that is a proper, big house, it’s our retreat. We can go back there to be away from it all. The other reason why I haven’t moved [to Hollywood] is that it’s been quite a long time that I’ve been working now. It’s coming up on 13, maybe 14 years. I know, it’s weird, isn’t it? I haven’t had to move so far, and things seem quite good. So, in a way, if I did go to Hollywood, I might become a bit more preoccupied with that side of my life than I want to be. I like the fact that I don’t feel like an actor. I don’t feel like a personality that’s in the newspapers occasionally. I don’t feel like that. I just feel very normal.

Question: What’s the biggest room in your house?
Newton: The biggest room is our kitchen.

Question: Is that where you spend most of your time when you’re there?
Newton: Yeah, because the garden is attached to the kitchen.

Question: What other things do you like to do when you’re not on a
movie set?
Newton: I give a lot of time and energy to my friends and my family.

Question: So family is the most important thing to you?
Newton: Family, but also my friends are my family, too.

Question: You said your husband is a writer. That must work out well for the both of you?
Newton: Yeah, it works well. It works well because when I’m not working, I can be a real help to him, a real support, and he uses me a lot for, I don’t know, to read his scripts.

Question: Has he written anything for you?
Newton: We’re hoping to do something next year together, actually, and that’s how we met. I worked on a film that he wrote, a TV movie that was fantastic.

Question: Which one?
Newton: It’s called In Your Dreams. It was very serious; a kind of grim tale, but it was really one of the best things that I’ve done.

Question: It must’ve been a long time ago?
Newton: Lets see, I was 22. So that was a while ago.

Question: What’s your hubby’s name?
Newton: Oliver, but he’s not the Oliver Parker … he’s Oliver Parker, but he’s not that one. He’s my Oliver Parker. And I love him so …

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