Naomi Watts

Naomi Ellen Watts (born 28 September 1968) is a British actress. After her family moved to Australia, she made her film debut there in the drama '' For Love Alone'' (1986) and then appeared in three television series, '' Hey Dad..!'' (1990), ''Brides of Christ'' (1991), and '' Home and Away'' (1991), and the film ''Flirting'' (1991). After moving to the United States, Watts initially struggled as an actress, taking roles in small-scale films until she starred in David Lynch's psychological thriller ''Mulholland Drive'' in 2001 as an aspiring actress. This role started her rise to international prominence.

Watts then played a tormented journalist in the horror remake '' The Ring'' (2002). She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as a grief-stricken mother in Alejandro González Iñárritu's film '' 21 Grams'' (2003). Her profile continued to grow with starring roles in ''I Heart Huckabees'' (2004), ''King Kong'' (2005), ''Eastern Promises'' (2007), and '' The International'' (2009).

For her role as Maria Bennett in the disaster film '' The Impossible'' (2012), Watts received another Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. In the 2010s, she starred in such films as '' Birdman'' (2014), '' St. Vincent'' (2014), '' While We're Young'' (2015), ''The Glass Castle'' (2017), and ''Luce'' (2019). Watts also continued to act in blockbusters, with appearances in the ''Divergent'' franchise (2015–2016), and she ventured into television with the Showtime mystery drama series ''Twin Peaks'' (2017) and the biographical limited series ''The Loudest Voice'' (2019).

Watts is particularly known for her work in remakes and independent productions with dark or tragic themes, as well as portrayals of characters that endure loss or suffering. Magazines such as ''People'' and ''Maxim'' have included her on their lists of the world's most beautiful women. She has been an ambassador for the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS and Pantene's Beautiful Lengths. Despite significant media attention, Watts is reticent about her personal life. From 2005 to 2016 she was in a relationship with American actor Liev Schreiber, with whom she has two sons.

Early life and education

Naomi Ellen Watts was born on 28 September 1968, in Shoreham, Kent, England. She is the daughter of Myfanwy (Miv) Edwards (née Roberts), an antiques dealer and costume and set designer, and Peter Watts (1946–1976), a road manager and sound engineer who worked with Pink Floyd.Stated on ''Inside the Actors Studio'', 2003. Watts's maternal grandfather was Welsh.

Watts's parents divorced when she was four years old. After the divorce, Watts and her elder brother, Ben Watts, moved several times across South East England with their mother. Peter Watts left Pink Floyd in 1974 and remarried in 1976. In August 1976, he was found dead in a flat in Notting Hill, of an apparent heroin overdose.

Following his death, Watts's mother moved the family to Llanfawr Farm in Llangefni and Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, towns on the island of Anglesey in North Wales, where they lived with Watts's maternal grandparents, Nikki and Hugh Roberts, for three years. During this time, Watts attended a Welsh medium school, Ysgol Gyfun Llangefni. She later said of her time in Wales: "We took Welsh lessons in a school in the middle of nowhere while everyone else was taking English. Wherever we moved, I would adapt and pick up the regional accent. It's obviously significant now, me being an actress. Anyway, there was quite a lot of sadness in my childhood, but no lack of love." In 1978, her mother remarried (though she later divorced) and Watts and her brother then moved to Suffolk, where she attended Thomas Mills High School. Watts has stated that she wanted to become an actress after seeing her mother performing on stage and from the time she watched the 1980 film '' Fame''.

In 1982, when Watts was 14, she moved to Sydney in Australia with her mother, brother and stepfather. Myfanwy established a career in the burgeoning film business, working as a stylist for television commercials, then turning to costume design, ultimately working for the soap opera ''Return to Eden''. After emigrating, Watts was enrolled in acting lessons by her mother; she auditioned for numerous television advertisements, where she met and befriended actress Nicole Kidman. Watts obtained her first role in the 1986 drama film, '' For Love Alone'', based on the novel of the same name by Christina Stead, and produced by Margaret Fink.

In Australia, Watts attended Mosman High School and North Sydney Girls High School. She failed to graduate from school, afterwards working as a papergirl, a negative cutter and managing a Delicacies store in Sydney's affluent North Shore.

She decided to become a model when she was 18. She signed with a models agency that sent her to Japan, but after several failed auditions, she returned to Sydney. There, she worked in advertising for a department store, which led ''Follow Me'' magazine to hire her as an assistant fashion editor. A casual invitation to participate in a drama workshop inspired Watts to quit her job and pursue acting.

Regarding her nationality, Watts has stated: "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." She also has expressed her ties to Australia, declaring: "I consider myself very connected to Australia, in fact when people say where is home, I say Australia, because those are my most powerful memories."

Career

Early roles and struggling career (1986–2000)

Watts's career began in television, where she made brief appearances in commercials. The 1986 film '' For Love Alone'', set in the 1930s and based on Christina Stead's 1945 best-selling novel of the same name, marked her debut in film. She then appeared in two episodes of the fourth season of the Australian sitcom '' Hey Dad..!'' in 1990. After a five-year absence from films, Watts met director John Duigan during the 1989 premiere of her friend Nicole Kidman's film ''Dead Calm'' and he invited her to take a supporting role in his 1991 indie film ''Flirting''. The film received critical acclaim and was featured on Roger Ebert's list of the 10 best films of 1992. Also in 1991, she took the part of Frances Heffernan, a girl who struggles to find friends behind the walls of a Sydney Catholic school, in the award-winning mini-series ''Brides of Christ'' and had a recurring role in the soap opera '' Home and Away'' as the handicapped Julie Gibson. Watts was then offered a role in the drama series '' A Country Practice'' but turned it down, not wanting to "get stuck on a soap for two or three years", a decision she later called "naïve".

Watts then took a year off to travel, visiting Los Angeles and being introduced to agents through Kidman. Encouraged, Watts decided to move to America, to pursue her career further. In 1993 she had a small role in the John Goodman film '' Matinee'' and temporarily returned to Australia to star in three Australian films: another of Duigan's pictures, ''Wide Sargasso Sea''; the drama ''The Custodian''; and had her first leading role in the film ''Gross Misconduct'', as a student who accuses one of her teachers (played by Jimmy Smits) of raping her. Watts then moved back to America for good but the difficulty of finding agents, producers and directors willing to hire her during that period frustrated her initial efforts. Though her financial situation never led her to taking a job out of the film industry, she experienced problems like being unable to pay the rent of her apartment and losing her medical insurance. "At first, everything was fantastic and doors were opened to me. But some people who I met through Nicole idman who had been all over me, had difficulty remembering my name when we next met. There were a lot of promises, but nothing actually came off. I ran out of money and became quite lonely, but Nic gave me company and encouragement to carry on."

She then won a supporting role in the futuristic 1995 film ''Tank Girl'', winning the role of "Jet Girl" after nine auditions. The film was met with mixed reviews and flopped at the box office, although it has gone on to become something of a cult classic. Throughout the rest of the decade, she took mostly supporting roles in films and occasionally considered leaving the business, but: "there were always little bites. Whenever I felt I was at the end of my rope, something would come up. Something bad. But for me it was 'work begets work'; that was my motto." In 1996, she starred alongside Joe Mantegna, Kelly Lynch and J.T. Walsh in George Hickenlooper's action-thriller ''Persons Unknown''; alongside James Earl Jones, Kevin Kilner and Ellen Burstyn in the period drama ''Timepiece''; in ''Bermuda Triangle'', a TV pilot that was not picked up for a full series, where she played a former documentary filmmaker who disappears in the Bermuda Triangle; and as the lead role in '' Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering'', in which children in a small town become possessed under the command of a wrongfully murdered child preacher.

In 1997, she starred in the Australian ensemble romantic drama ''Under the Lighthouse Dancing'' starring Jack Thompson and Jacqueline McKenzie. She also played the lead role in the short-lived television series '' Sleepwalkers''. In 1998, she starred alongside Neil Patrick Harris and Debbie Reynolds in the TV film ''The Christmas Wish'', played the supporting role of Giulia De Lezze in ''Dangerous Beauty'', and provided some voice work for '' Babe: Pig in the City''. She said in an interview in 2012, "That really should not be on my résumé! I think that was early on in the day, when I was trying to beef up my résumé. I came in and did a couple days' work of voiceovers and we had to suck on eliumand then do a little mouse voice. But I was one in a hundred, so I'm sure you would never be able to identify my voice. I probably couldn't either!" In 1999, she played Alice in the romantic comedy '' Strange Planet'' and the Texan student Holly Maddux in '' The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer'', which was based on the real life effort to capture Ira Einhorn, who was charged with Maddux's murder. In 2000, while David Lynch was expanding the rejected pilot of ''Mulholland Drive'' into a feature film, Watts starred alongside Derek Jacobi, Jack Davenport and Iain Glen in the BBC
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