Rachel Weisz tells Mick Brown why playing Deborah Lipstadt, the historian who stood up to Holocaust denier David Irving, is her most personal role yet

Throughout her career, Rachel Weisz has portrayed strong women who challenge injustice. But no role has been more personal than that of Deborah Lipstadt, the American professor sued for libel by Hitler apologist David Irving, in a drama that gripped the w

In February last year, Rachel Weisz and a small film crew were given permission to film at Auschwitz Birkenau, the Nazi death camp in Poland where almost one million Jews died. Weisz, who is herself Jewish, and whose parents were European refugees who fled to Britain before the Second World War, had never visited Auschwitz before.

‘Something happens,’ she says. ‘One feels, I don’t have a big enough brain or sense of perception to take this in. I suppose what is striking is just the level of organisation that was employed. Where we filmed was the place where the trains would pull up and the steps to the showers were right there. There would have been no time for the people to do anything. You’d have just got off the train, been told to gather your belongings; that you were going to have a quick shower and then life would begin in this work camp. No time to see anybody, talk to anybody; you’d just go straight down the steps into the shower and… you know…’

We are sitting in a small Italian restaurant in New York’s East Village. The hiss of a coffee machine. Laughter coming from a neighbouring table. Weisz toying with her salmon and drinking herbal tea. The mundanity of life. Weisz has lived in New York for the past 10 years, and walked the few blocks from her home, bundled up against the cold in a thick anorak, jeans and boots, her face half hidden under a huge fur hat. She bought it while filming in Poland. She is a delightfully warm and unpretentious woman, polite to a fault, given to impromptu jokes and sudden bursts of laughter. But not right now.

‘There’s a museum there,’ she goes on, ‘that has piles and piles of objects – a mountain, three times as big as this room, of spectacles; of artificial limbs, pots and pans and hairbrushes; suitcases with names and dates of children, so you can figure out the ages – a five-year-old, a four-year-old…

From left Rachel Weisz as Deborah Lipstadt in Denial, filmed in part at Auschwitz; Lipstadt celebrates outside the court after winning the libel case brought against her by David Irving, 2000