Background
Weaving was born to English parents Anne (née Lennard), and Wallace Weaving. His maternal grandmother was Belgian.
Weaving was born to English parents Anne (née Lennard), and Wallace Weaving. His maternal grandmother was Belgian.
While in England, he attended the independent boarding school Queen Elizabeth's Hospital. His family moved back to Australia in 1976, where he attended another private school, Sydney's Knox Grammar School.
Australia
A graduate of Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art, blond,
idiosyncratic leading man Hugo Weaving made his feature film debut in
the socially conscious low-budget drama The City's Edge (1983),
purportedly one of the first Australian films to sympathetically portray
the adverse conditions suffered by aborigines. In 1991, Weaving
received Best Actor kudos from the Australian Film Institute for his
portrayal of a blind photographer in Jocelyn Moorhouse's Proof.
In 1994,the actor earned international acclaim playing Tick, a drag queen with a
secret, in the cult favorite The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the
Desert (1994). The following year, Weaving was involved in another
audience pleaser when he lent his voice to play the sheep dog Rex in
Babe. Weaving occasionally appears in U.S. television productions,
notably the CBS miniseries Dadah Is Death, in which he played opposite
Julie Christie and Sarah Jessica Parker. He also continues to work
steadily in Australia, in addition to appearing in big-budget Hollywood
affairs such as The Matrix, in which he starred as an evil agent
opposite Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne. Following his turn in The
Matrix with a few low-key romantic comedies (Strange Planet [also 1999]
and Russian Doll [2001]), Weaving made a return to big-budgeted special
effects extravaganzas with his involvement in director Peter Jackson's
enormous adaptation of author J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. For
the sequels to The Matrix, Weaving would return with a vengeance; with
hundreds of Agent Smith clones sent to stop Neo (Keanu Reeves) from
leading the revolution against the machines.
An affiliation with another hit sci-fi series emerged when Weaving
provided the voice of Megatron in Michael Bay's Transformers (as well as its two sequels),
though it was the actor's affecting performance in 2009's Last Ride that earned
him a nomination for Best Lead Actor at that year's Australian Film
Institute awards. Cast as a dangerous Australian fugitive who flees from
the law with his young son in tow, Weaving gave viewers a glimpse of
the talent that was often overshadowed in his many larger-than-life
roles, though it was his scenery-chewing performance as Johann
Schmidt/Red Skull in Captain America: The First Avenger that got him
back on the big screen in the U.S. following the disappointment of The
Wolfman. Meanwhile, the busy screen veteran prepared for roles in Cloud
Atlas (a sprawling sci-fi epic from Tom Tykwer and Andy and Lana
Wachowski), and Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy.
