Embeth Davidtz

Embeth Jean Davidtz (born August 11, 1965) is an American actress. She is best known as her role as Miss Jennifer Honey in the film Matilda. Her screen roles include movies such as Mansfield Park, Bicentennial Man (opposite Robin Williams), the crime drama Fracture (as screen wife of Anthony Hopkins) and the television series Mad Men. Davidtz spent much of her early life in South Africa. --- Davidtz was born in Lafayette, Indiana, while her father was studying chemical engineering at Purdue University. Her parents, John and Jean, later moved to Trenton, New Jersey, and then back to their native South Africa, when Davidtz was nine years old. Davidtz has Dutch, English, and French ancestry. She had to learn Afrikaans before attending school classes in South Africa, where her father took up a teaching post at Potchefstroom University. She graduated from The Glen High School in Pretoria in 1983, and earned a degree in English Literature from Rhodes University in Grahamstown. Davidtz made her professional acting debut at age 21 with CAPAB (Cape Performing Arts Board, now known as Artscape) in Cape Town, playing Juliet in a stage production of Romeo and Juliet, at the Maynardville Open-Air Theatre. Performing in English and Afrikaans, the bilingual actress also starred in other local plays, including Stille Nag (Silent Night) and A Chain of Voices, both earning her nominations for the South African equivalent of the Tony Award. Her film debut came in 1988 with a small role in South African-filmed American horror Mutator,[citation needed] (where her character was eaten by a giant cat). Shortly after she won a bigger part in South African shot tele-movie A Private Life, as the daughter of an interracial couple.[citation needed] She garnered the South African equivalent of an Oscar nomination playing a rape victim who becomes deaf and mute, in psychologically intense Afrikaans feature Nag van die 19de (Night of the 19th) in 1992. --- After meeting with an agent in London, Davidtz moved to Los Angeles in 1992, and quickly landed a role in her first American film, Sam Raimi's Evil Dead sequel Army of Darkness. Soon after, she appeared in two NBC projects, the made-for-television film Till Death Do Us Part and the miniseries Deadly Matrimony. She was also seen in Laura Ziskin's short film Oh, What A Day, opposite Viggo Mortensen. Director Steven Spielberg spotted the actress in Deadly Matrimony and cast her in Schindler's List as Helen Hirsch, the Jewish maid. Davidtz next had a high-profile central role in the fact-based film Murder in the First (1995), followed by the Merchant Ivory production Feast of July (also 1995). In Matilda (1996), a feature based on Roald Dahl's children's fantasy, she played the role of Miss Honey, the grade one teacher of the title character. --- Davidtz had long-term relationships with actors Harvey Keitel and Ben Chaplin. She married entertainment attorney Jason Sloane on June 22, 2002, and has two children, Charlotte Emily (born in 2002) and Asher Dylan (born in 2005).