Thandie Newton

“I just feel like it's got to be about the process and about the doing of it, rather than be about how it's going to be perceived."

Thandiwe Nashita "Thandie" Newton (born 6 November 1972) is an English actress. She has appeared in a number of British and American films, including The Pursuit of Happyness, Mission: Impossible II, Crash, Run, Fatboy, Run and W.

Newton was born in London, the daughter of Nyasha, a Zimbabwean health-care worker and Nick Newton, a laboratory technician and artist.  Her birthplace has been incorrectly reported to be Zambia in some biographies, but she has confirmed in interviews that she was born in London, during a two-week trip by her parents.  The name "Thandiwe" means "beloved" in Ndebele, Zulu, Xhosa or Swazi, and "Thandie" is pronounced /ˈtændi/ tan-dee in English. According to Newton, her mother is a Zimbabwean Shona princess. Raised in London and

Penzance, Cornwall. She studied dance at the Tring Park School for the Performing Arts (formally, Arts Educational School, Tring Park) and at sixteen, while recovering from a back injury, she successfully auditioned for her first film role. She then went on to study social anthropology at Downing College, Cambridge, from 1992 to 1995.

She married English writer/director/producer Ol Parker in 1998. The couple have two daughters: Ripley, born in 2000, and Nico, born in 2004. Her daughters were named after the character Ellen Ripley in the Alien films and the singer Nico.
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".

In 2008, Newton visited poverty-stricken Mali, describing it as a "humbling experience". She visited the village of Nampasso in the Ségou Region of the country.

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 sound cars.

Dim lights