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Naomi Ellen Watts (born September 28, 1968) is an English-Australian actress. She is known for her roles in Mulholland Drive, the film remakes of The Ring, King Kong and most recently Funny Games, as well as her Academy Award-nominated role in the film 21 Grams. Although she had been acting for more than 15 years, Naomi Watts finally had her big breakthrough role when she was tapped by David Lynch to portray an aspiring starlet in "Mulholland Drive" (2001) – the director’s bizarre, darkly nightmarish vision of Los Angeles. Originally made as a pilot for a projected television series, the film found a second life when producer Alain Sarde and StudioCanal joined forces to provide funding for Lynch to re-imagine his vision as a feature film. After its premiere at Cannes, "Mulholland Drive" went on to confound or captivate critics and audiences, but nearly all were certain that Watts emerged as an actress of force and presence in such critical and/or commercial hits as “The Ring” (2002), “21 Grams” (2003) and “King Kong.” Watts was born in Shoreham, Kent, England, the daughter of Myfannwy "Miv" (née Roberts), an antiques dealer and costume and set designer, and Peter Watts, a road manager and sound engineer who worked with Pink Floyd (her father's manic laugh and mother's comment about "cruisin' for a bruisin'" are featured in Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon). Watts is pictured, in her mother's arms, with her father, brother, Pink Floyd, and other crew members, in the hardback edition of Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason' autobiography of the band Inside Out. Watts has one brother, Ben Watts, a year older and now a photographer in the United States (she confessed that they fought like cats and dogs as children). Watts' parents separated when she was four years old, and when she was seven, her father died. Following her father's death, her mother relocated the family to Llanfawr Farm, on the Isle of Anglesey in North Wales, where they lived with Watts' maternal grandparents, Nikki and Hugh Roberts. Watts described her mother as a hippie "with passive-aggressive tendencies" and no money, who used to threaten to send her and her brother to foster care in order to get her parents to provide for them. Although her mother occasionally moved the family around Wales and England, usually to follow boyfriends, she always ended up returning to Llangefni. Watts lived there until she was 14. The family moved to Sydney in 1982. Her grandmother was Australian, which made it easier to obtain the documentation necessary, since Naomi and her family were entitled to Australian citizenship. Of her nationality, she has said, "I consider myself British and have very happy memories of the UK. I spent the first 14 years of my life in England and Wales and never wanted to leave. When I was in Australia I went back to England a lot". In Sydney, Watts attended several acting schools, including North Sydney Girls High School, where her classmates included Nicole Kidman, with whom she is still close. In 1986 she took a break from acting and went to Japan to work as a model, but the experience, which lasted for about four months, was fruitless as Watts did not have the physical requirements for a professional runway model and could only hope to be working in promotions, which did not excite her. Watts describes it as one of the worst periods of her life. Upon returning to Australia, she went to work for a local department store and from there she went to work as assistant fashion editor with an Australian fashion magazine. A casual invitation to participate in a drama workshop rekindled her passion for acting, and prompted her to quit her job and dedicate herself to succeeding as an actress. Watts' career began in Australian television, where she appeared in commercials and television melodramas such as Home and Away and Brides of Christ. She was featured in a supporting role in the acclaimed 1991 Australian indie film Flirting, which starred future Hollywood up-and-comers Nicole Kidman and Thandie Newton. As Watts made the transition from Australia to the United States, she landed a supporting role in the cult 1995 film Tank Girl, playing the part of "Jet Girl". Watts appeared in a string of TV productions of varying quality, from the "Hallmark Hall of Fame" drama "Timepiece" (CBS, 1995) to the failed 1997 NBC series "Sleepwalkers" to the above average miniseries "The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer" (CBS, 1999). Between small screen gigs, the actress was cast as the wife of a Venetian nobleman in "Dangerous Beauty/Destiny of Her Own" (1998) and as a fragile, morally upright young woman in "Strange Planet" (1999), Emma-Kate Croghan's ensemble film about a group of friends struggling to cope with modern life. Then came along a strange, brilliant man named David Lynch. Finding quality roles in the Hollywood system at first proved difficult for Watts. She appeared in the short-lived series Sleepwalkers and numerous B-list productions such as films like Children of the Corn IV. Gradually, Watts garnered supporting roles in films such as Dangerous Beauty. In 2001 Naomi starred in The Shaft directed by Dick Maas which earned nothing but rotten tomatoes. Watts displayed a similar charisma in the Sundance-screened short "Ellie Parker" (2001), about an Australian actress trying to carve a career in L.A. Having to switch gears from auditioning for the role of a Southern belle, to trying out for the part of a street junkie, she displayed her amazing range and prodigious talent. Casting agents and directors began to take notice following this one-two punch and Watts found herself being offered choice roles. She starred as a frontier widow who harbors an outlaw in the Showtime original "The Outsider" (2002) and played a TV newswoman investigating a rash of elevator accidents in "Down" (2001). In 2001, Watts starred in David Lynch's highly acclaimed Mulholland Drive. The film, which premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, won her the National Society of Film Critics Award as Best Actress and the National Board of Review award as Breakthrough Performance of the year. Watts worked with director/screenwriter Scott Coffey on Lynch's Mulholland Drive, where Watts had her breakout performance. Her next film, the semi-autobiographical Ellie Parker, grew out of the friendship forged between Watts and Coffey. In 2002, she starred in one of the biggest box office hits of that year, the English language remake of the Japanese horror film The Ring. The following year, she starred in the film Ned Kelly opposite Heath Ledger, Orlando Bloom, and Geoffrey Rush; as well as the Merchant-Ivory film Le Divorce with Kate Hudson. Her performance opposite Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro in director Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams earned Watts her first Academy Award nomination as Best Actress. After the rush of attention following "Mulholland Drive," Watts effectively kept herself in the public eye thanks to two high-profile relationships: one with her longtime friend Kidman, whose constant shows of support added luster to Watts' rising star; and a romantic relationship with up-and-coming heartthrob Heath Ledger, which captivated the paparazzi. But she continued to deliver the goods on-screen as well, delivering a strong, emotional performance in her first mainstream star vehicle, the haunted high-tech thriller "The Ring" (2002), playing an investigative journalist and single mom who discovers a cursed videotape. The Gore Verbinski-helmed film established her firmly as a bankable star and was such a hit, she returned to give an equally strong central performance in the otherwise less inspired 2005 sequel "The Ring 2." She produced and starred in the well-received independent film We Don't Live Here Anymore. She reunited with Sean Penn and Don Cheadle in The Assassination of Richard Nixon, teamed up with Jude Law and Dustin Hoffman in David O. Russell's ensemble comedy I Love Huckabees, and starred in the sequel to the Ring, The Ring Two. She then starred in the much-anticipated remake of King Kong (2005). The role, which was immortalized by Fay Wray in the original film, proved to be Watts' most commercially successful film yet. Helmed by The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, the film won high praise and grossed $550 million worldwide. Less satisfying was "Stay" (2005), director Marc Forster's ambitious but murky psychological thriller as the girlfriend of a shrink (Ewan McGregor) whose suicidal patient somehow begins invading his dreams and blurring the lines of their realities and individualities, including their relationship. Her next film, "Ellie Parker" (2005), was an intriguing experimental curiosity: in 2001 writer-director Steve Coffey shot Watts with a handheld digital video camera for a 16-minute short, which cast the actress as a young actress trying to protect and nurture her talent in heartless Hollywood. Over the ensuring years Watts and Coffey would reunite whenever they could find a free day together and add new sequences to Ellie's story, until he finally had a full film for release in 2005. Watts then took on a project of much bigger proportions, cast in the iconic Fay Wray role of Ann Darrow for director Peter Jackson's long-dreamt-of, much anticipated remake of "King Kong.", While “King Kong” provided Watts with even wider exposure than she had before, the thankless role of damsel in distress ultimately proved to be limiting. She returned to smaller budgets with “The Painted Veil” (2006), a romantic drama about a young English couple (Watts and Edward Norton) married for the wrong reasons who relocate to Shanghai, where she falls in love with another man (Liev Schreiber – later to become her real-life boyfriend post-Ledger and fiancé in April 2006). In “Eastern Promises” (2007), Watts played a London midwife who delves into the past of a Russian prostitute after she dies during childbirth, only to stumble into a Russian police operation trying to expose a major Eastern mafia prostitution ring. Watts starred in The Painted Veil with Edward Norton and Liev Schreiber, released in December 2006. She has since finished the films Funny Games (a remake of an Austrian movie) with Tim Roth and Eastern Promises 2008 with Viggo Mortensen. The press has labeled her the "queen of remakes" because she has starred in so many remakes, and she is scheduled to star in the remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). Watts will only state that there have been "discussions" about the "The Birds" remake. In May 2006, Watts was named a special representative to the U.N. program for HIV/AIDS. On July 24, 2007, The Courier-Mail reported that Naomi Watts had been cast as Narcissa Malfoy in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, with Stuart Townsend and Joseph Fiennes, the younger brother of Ralph Fiennes (Lord Voldemort), also being cast in unspecified roles. On the next day, representatives of Watts, Townsend and Fiennes said that the rumors were not true. Watts previously dated director Daniel Kirby, playwright Jeff Smeenge, director Stephen Hopkins and Heath Ledger, her co-star in the film Ned Kelly. Since spring 2005, Watts has dated actor Liev Schreiber. The couple's son, Alexander Pete, was born on July 26, 2007 in Los Angeles. Watts is a close friend of Benicio del Toro, with whom she co-starred in 21 Grams. After filming The Painted Veil, she converted to Buddhism, claiming, "I have some belief but I am not a strict Buddhist or anything yet. There was a lot of excitement and energy there". |
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