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THEATRE AND FILMS
B
orn 6 November 1972 is a British actress. She
has appeared in a number of British and Americanfilms, including The Pursuit of Happyness,
Mission: Impossible II, Crash, Run Fatboy Run,
W., 2012, Norbit and For Colored Girls.
Newton was born in London, England, the
daughter of Nyasha, a Zimbabwean health-care
worker, and Nick Newton, a British 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. The name “Thandiwe” means “beloved”
in Ndebele, Zulu, Xhosa or Swazi, and “Thandie” is pronounced /?tændi/ TAN-dee in English. According to Newton, her mother is a Shona
princess.
Regarding her childhood, Newton remarked at a TED conference: “From
about the age of 5, I was aware that I didn’t fit. I was the black, atheist kid
in the all-white, Catholic school run by nuns. I was an anomaly.” Brought
up in London and Penzance, Cornwall, she studied dance at the Tring
Park School for the Performing Arts 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, where she achieved a 2:1.
Newton made her film debut in Flirting (1991). She played the role of
Brad Pitt’s maid Yvette in Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire
Chronicles(1994)
She gained international recognition in the Merchant Ivory production
of Jefferson in Paris as Sally Hemings, which led to her being cast in Jon-