Naomi Watts

[©brad]

ms. watts was on ellen this morning (which btw is probably the best talk show on the air right now) and she was wonderful, not to mention sexy as hell. ellen was asking her about her accent and how she so effortlessly could play an american role, and naiomi was all like "well i work on it a lot" and then ellen asked her to look into the camera to do the whole "we'll be right back after this commercial break" thing, but she had to do it in an american accent. she did it. i almost creamed my pants.

it's not her american accent (all in all kinda dull and ugly, like most american accents) that gets me going, for her british/austrailian one is far more beautiful. it's her ability to change and control her voice. i'm not articulating this very well but there's something about it that makes me go   .

[godardian]

ms. watts was on ellen this morning (which btw is probably the best talk show on the air right now) and she was wonderful, not to mention sexy as hell. ellen was asking her about her accent and how she so effortlessly could play an american role, and naiomi was all like "well i work on it a lot" and then ellen asked her to look into the camera to do the whole "we'll be right back after this commercial break" thing, but she had to do it in an american accent. she did it. i almost creamed my pants.

it's not her american accent (all in all kinda dull and ugly, like most american accents) that gets me going, for her british/austrailian one is far more beautiful. it's her ability to change and control her voice. i'm not articulating this very well but there's something about it that makes me go   .

I like Ellen lots, too. She even had The Thrills performing!

Watts's abilities in every aspect of acting are profound. Her two separate American accents in Mulholland Dr. alone are the perfect voices for those characters...

Off to make sure TiVo doesn't miss Ellen this morning (bless you, time difference!).

[godardian]

I caught her on Ellen. She made mac 'n cheese and Ellen gave her a Heath bar (geddit?). It was nice, very daytime. I realize I like both celebs and hosts on the daytime shows- they're much more relaxed.

From IMDB:

Nicole Kidman is so confident her best friend Naomi Watts will win an Oscar next month, she's already organized a party for her. Watts' performance in 21 Grams has bagged her a Best Actress nomination, and impressed Kidman wants her fellow Australian native to bask in the same glory she experienced last year, when she won the coveted prize for her role in The Hours. An insider says, "Nicole and Naomi grew up together and have always been there for each other. This is the kind of thing they used to dream of back in Australia. Nicole had her moment and won her Oscar and she's told Naomi it would give her even more pleasure to see her get one."

[cron]

Watts up

Blonde, beautiful and talented, yes, but it was only when David Lynch revealed her darker side that her name went up in lights. Now, Naomi Watts is tipped for an oscar in '21 Grams'. Stuart Husband meets the Brit-born actress

Sunday February 8, 2004
The Observer

There's a moment in 21 Grams, Alejandro González Iñárritu's shattering, sombre movie about grief and loss, when you realise why Naomi Watts has become the most critically acclaimed actress of her generation. Sean Penn has just turned up on her doorstep and announced that her dead husband's heart has been transplanted into him. Watts's face, previously stony with grief, is convulsed by micro-flashes of disgust, incomprehension and pity, before she erupts in a rage so palpable and untethered that you fear for her sanity.
Many people have been struck by this emotional elasticity in Watts, including Iñárritu, who is fulsome in his praise of his leading lady when introducing the movie at a special preview screening. 'She has the beautiful face of an innocent angel one moment, and the next moment she will have the face of the devil,' he exclaims, animatedly. 'It's like she has all these layers that she peels away. She's like a wild orchid,' he concludes.

The template for Watts's split-screen personality was set by her breakthrough film, 2001's Mulholland Drive. David Lynch's bizarre vision of the Hollywood hall of mirrors was embodied by Watts, who started the movie as a perky, naive wannabe actress named Betty and morphed midway into a wracked, suicidal piece of Tinseltown jetsam named Diane, blasted by bitterness and an obsessive passion for another woman. It could have been a literal morph: as Diane, Watts's physical mannerisms, and even the shape of her face, were transformed. It seemed incomprehensible that Watts had been struggling for a decade in Hollywood prior to Mulholland Drive's release, though Iñárritu thinks this will work to her advantage in the end: 'She's like a good wine,' he says. 'You put her in the cellar for a few years, then bring her out, and she's even better, more complex, than before.'

Since Mulholland Drive, Watts has beefed up a brace of so-so movies. In The Ring, the workmanlike re-make of the Japanese psycho-horror classic, she added gravitas and unpredictability to a generic woman-in-peril role; in Merchant-Ivory's turgid Le Divorce, she seemed to have wandered on to the set of a frothy burlesque in the mistaken belief that it was something more profound. No matter how facile her characters might appear on paper, Watts, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, is able to endow them with sadness and the gift of pain.

Meeting her in the hushed library of a London hotel, Watts cuts a tomboyish figure. With her blonde hair tied back and her slender, 5ft 5in frame encased in a black boat-neck sweater over a stripy shirt and mildly distressed jeans, she is much younger looking than her 35 years. She chats animatedly about her Yorkshire terrier, Bob (he's been sick, but he's better now) and her adoration of The Office (she thinks Ricky Gervais is 'just a genius'). The force of her frequent, uninhibited laughter sends her sprawling amid the scatter cushions.

How does she feel about being sorrow's poster girl? 'Well, great things come out of darkness,' she says, her eyes narrowing and face clouding. 'Humour, creativity, sexuality... pain is a really important part of life. It forces you into facing hard things and answering difficult questions.

I think it's really important, as an artist, to have experienced suffering. I just find it more interesting.' She raises her eyebrows. 'Maybe you can take it too far. I mean, even in an ostensible romantic comedy like Le Divorce, I managed to play someone who attempts suicide. But it's not like I'm waking up in the morning and going, "How dark am I going to be today?" I think I'm pretty funny; I'm goofy and I can make my friends laugh. It's just that in the books I read, the paintings I like and the movies I go to see, I'm drawn to the dark and the mysterious.'

In that case, Watts and 21 Grams - named, as everyone may know by now, for the 'weight of the soul', ie the amount of weight lost at the moment of death - are a perfect match, as her raft of Golden Globe, Critics' Circle, Bafta and Oscar nominations confirm. Iñárritu's follow-up to his highly acclaimed Amores Perros is not only shattering, it's literally shattered. The movie's cubist structure cuts back and forth in time to piece together the blighted lives of its three protagonists - maths professor Penn, who teams up with grieving widow Watts after he receives her husband's heart to seek revenge on Benicio Del Toro's ex-con turned Jesus freak, who has wiped out Watts's family in a hit-and-run. Some critics have grumbled that Iñárritu's fast and loose approach to linearity serves to mask the melodramatic excesses of the plot, but all agree that the three protagonists are amazing to watch. Penn is quietly devastating, while Del Toro lopes through the film. But Watts has drawn special acclaim for the role of Cristina. 'Parts of her performance are unwatchable,' wrote one US critic, 'for all the right reasons.'

'She was such a beautiful soul to take on,' says Watts, who spent weeks attending group therapy meetings and sessions of Alcoholics Anonymous to prepare for the role (Cristina, it turns out, is an ex-addict, and her loss propels her back to the bottle). 'And I don't think Alejandro strikes a false note in the whole film, even though we're dealing with pretty heavy stuff. Having seen Amores Perros, I was willing to try anything, knowing I was in safe hands. He created an environment where you were allowed to try anything; you could play a scene every way from contained to OTT. I loved that freedom. Some actors edit their own performances; I hope I'm not guilty of that.'

There's a lot of death in 21 Grams, but its basic message seems to be, well, Life Goes On. 'You have to endure,' says Watts. 'I do believe that. I met people who've suffered terrible trauma, and they're forever changed and still angry, but they find a way to survive and find new meaning and beauty in the world and their lives, even if it's forever tainted by what they went through.'

Watts's commitment to the movie is informed by personal experience: her father, Peter, died in 1976, when she was just seven. She was born in Shoreham, Kent. Her mother Myffanwy (aka Miv) ran a semi-hippy household - bread baking, clothes weaving, the odd spot of pot smoking - and Peter was a sound engineer for bands such as Pink Floyd; that's his cracked laugh you can hear at the beginning of their 1973 classic Dark Side of the Moon. Peter and Miv were divorced when Watts was four, but were contemplating getting back together at the time of his death. Watts has said that, at that point, she basically withdrew, and has no clear memories of her childhood. When her mother attended a screening of 21 Grams, says Watts, 'She came up to me and hugged me and started sobbing and said, "I'm so sorry. I thought you were resilient because you seemed to express your emotions when your father died, but your brother didn't. [Watts's brother, Ben, is now a photographer.] And it's obvious you've experienced such pain."' Watts shakes her head. 'It was a bit of a moment.'

Actually, she says, she doesn't really remember expressing anything at the time. 'I was so young; I didn't understand death at all. I don't remember consciously blocking things out. But I did feel this sense of dislocation and apart-ness, though I had no point of reference back then. So 21 Grams was cathartic for me in many ways. All the best art helps to answer some of your own questions.' (And there are subtler, ongoing forms of catharsis; Watts's mobile phone ring-tone is 'Money', also from Dark Side of the Moon).

Watts's childhood was peripatetic - odysseys through England and Wales, a spell in an English boarding school - until Miv, feeling stymied by the early-Eighties recession in Britain, decided to move her family to Australia. Watts was 14 at the time. 'I really didn't want to go,' she says. 'To me, it was just another upheaval, new friends to make, a new accent to learn. Though actually,' she says, smiling, 'the accent thing wasn't so difficult. My brother still sounds really English, but I've always absorbed the accent of every place I've ever lived. Anyway, my mother persuaded me to give it six months. It worked. I loved it.'

But she was no nearer finding her role in life. Her school reports lambasted her inability to concentrate. Acting had always been part of the background noise - Watts remembers Miv, an aspiring actress until her kids came along, performing in a local Shoreham theatre production of My Fair Lady 'when I was about four or five', and in Sydney she started working on costumes and sets for movies (she now runs a couple of shops in Norfolk, called House Bait, selling ethnic interior things).

Watts entered a drama programme at high school, but left before graduation for a 'depressing' stint as a model in Japan and a 'stressful' period as a fashion editor on an Australian magazine. An impulsive visit to a weekend drama workshop was the catalyst. 'I'd been living a lie, I think. I was putting off plunging into that world because I thought I didn't really have the confidence to get up in front of people. But that weekend really lit the fuse. I walked into the office on Monday morning and quit. Everyone thought I was crazy. But within days I was going to my first casting.'

It was there that she met Nicole Kidman, then just another aspiring Aussie actress. 'I already knew who she was,' she says. 'We had some friends in common.' The pair acted together in the Aussie boarding-school coming-of-age movie Flirting in 1991 and their friendship is now two decades old - Kidman accompanied Watts, hand-in-hand, to the premiere of The Ring. 'The Aussie acting scene is pretty intimate,' says Watts. 'Everyone knows each other, at least by sight. So it's only natural that you stay in touch. But Nicole's always been a great support to me.'

That support has sometimes been sorely needed, particularly after Watts moved to Hollywood in the early Nineties. 'I was ambitious,' she says, 'and I wanted to go to the place that was really at the heart of things and try my luck.'

For years, her stock of the latter was notably low. For every C-list movie or graveyard-slot TV drama she managed to grace - Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering and The Bermuda Triangle were among the most piquant - there was a soul-destroying round of unsuccessful auditions, plummeting finances and health insurance, lost rental apartments and, latterly, pointed inquiries about her age. 'I don't know how I hung in there,' she says now. 'Well, actually, I do. I mean, I had my bags packed a bunch of times, ready to run back to Australia. But I always had just enough bites along the way to keep me there, to keep my hopes alive. My family is big on survival mechanisms. We all work incredibly hard, which comes from having no money. But I felt like jacking it in so many times. People were like, "Are you a masochist? Why put yourself through this?"'

Did she look to Kidman as an example? 'Not really,' she says, carefully. 'I mean, she was in such a different league.' One weekend, Watts found herself flying to Montana in a private jet with Emilio Estevez and joining Kidman and then-husband Tom Cruise on the set of their mawkish Oirish fantasy Far and Away. 'It was freaky. How could I compare myself to that level of success? It would be really unhealthy. So I'd play tricks on myself; I'd say, "Well, there's someone who really wants to be me, because I've got a Screen Actors' Guild card, £2,000 in the bank and a little Honda, and I'm trying to live my dream." I mean, it sounds brutal, but there's always someone further down the food chain than you are.'

The ranks of Watts wannabes were considerably swollen after the release of Mulholland Drive in 2001. In fact, her name has now become a kind of talisman among struggling actresses to hold aloft as they wade through their rejection slips. 'I'll never be able to say the words "David Lynch" without a fawning gratitude,' she laughs. 'I mean, two roles of a lifetime in one movie... 360 degrees of Naomi Watts. But it wasn't just the movie. David made me believe in myself. I'd become a sort of diluted person in Los Angeles, trying to succeed in what seemed a horribly uncreative place, auditioning in front of people who didn't understand me for a role I didn't believe in for one second. You leave pieces of yourself everywhere until you feel like a shell, a hulk. David tapped into that. He's incredibly intuitive. He saw through all the skins I'd built around myself and taught me that it was OK to embrace, well, you know...'

She smiles sheepishly. We're back to the dark stuff?

'Yes,' she laughs. 'He said, "You know, that being sweet was one thing, but being dark could be just as positive." I think I was frightened of being judged and giving too much of myself away. I went against a lot of what I thought were my better instincts in doing some of the stuff in Mulholland Drive. But that's a good director, someone who can tap into that, de-intellectualise you a bit.'

Watts stops short. She's afraid, she says, of appearing too portentous, and assures me that her joint British-Australian heritage has left her with a wide self-deprecatory seam that should, hopefully, stop her disappearing up her own fundament. In fact, she's now making her first foray into all-out comedy, albeit of the black variety, with a role in I Heart Huckabee's, David Three Kings O Russell's tale of a husband-and-wife team of existential detectives. 'I was calling David, saying, "Are you sure there's nobody else out there that you want for this?"' she says. 'I was absolutely terrified. "Can I do this? What if people have enjoyed what I've done and now they see this and hate me and I've ruined it all?"'

It seems an odd thing for someone to ask when they're basking in acclaim, peer respect, serial magazine cover-stardom and even the obligatory A-list relationship. (Watts has been seeing fellow Aussie actor Heath Ledger, 11 years her junior, after meeting him on the set of Ned Kelly; there was a recent conflicting-schedules blip, but they were spotted back in lovey-dovey mode in the New South Wales resort of Byron Bay over Christmas). But Watts's art is haunted by her long period in the wilderness, and she acknowledges - and works from - a long legacy of insecurities and uncertainties. She warns that we should make the most of her time in the spotlight: 'I'm dying to nest and put down roots. I've wanted to have kids since I was 19. Besides, I know everyone's going to get sick of me soon,' she says, with a grin.

However, I'm more inclined to return to Alejandro González Iñárritu's earlier analogy; the Watts vintage has only just been uncorked, and there'll be more complex notes to savour before she's through.

· 21 Grams is released on 5 March

[©brad]

I caught her on Ellen. She made mac 'n cheese and Ellen gave her a Heath bar (geddit?). It was nice, very daytime. I realize I like both celebs and hosts on the daytime shows- they're much more relaxed.

oh i get it.   and yeah, i totally agree about daytime talk shows, although i don' really watch much of them. (i actually get a kick out of the View) but ellen degeneres rocks, as does her new show. i'm glad she's doing well. (i love how she has a dj instead of a band and how she dances at the beginning of each show)  

From IMDB:

Nicole Kidman is so confident her best friend Naomi Watts will win an Oscar next month, she's already organized a party for her. Watts' performance in 21 Grams has bagged her a Best Actress nomination, and impressed Kidman wants her fellow Australian native to bask in the same glory she experienced last year, when she won the coveted prize for her role in The Hours. An insider says, "Nicole and Naomi grew up together and have always been there for each other. This is the kind of thing they used to dream of back in Australia. Nicole had her moment and won her Oscar and she's told Naomi it would give her even more pleasure to see her get one."

it's gonna come down to either her or charlize. tough call.

[Pas]

I caught her on Ellen. She made mac 'n cheese and Ellen gave her a Heath bar (geddit?).

I don't  

[godardian]

I caught her on Ellen. She made mac 'n cheese and Ellen gave her a Heath bar (geddit?).

I don't  

HEATH bar. It's kind of a pun and has to do with celebrity-gossip surrounding Ms. Watts and...?

[SoNowThen]

Heathcliff Montgomery

[godardian]

Heathcliff Montgomery

Lukewarm.

[tpfkabi]

nice article, but did the first sentence give away one of the main spoilers?

i have yet to see it, but the trailer in front of LiT made me want to.
and Naomi has a little something to do with it.....just a tad

[Chest Rockwell]

nice article, but did the first sentence give away one of the main spoilers?

i have yet to see it, but the trailer in front of LiT made me want to.
and Naomi has a little something to do with it.....just a tad

You MUST see it as soon as possible!

[Sanjuro]

as much as i really want her to win, it relaly looks like charlize is going to... im not saying she doesnt deserve it too but damn itd be the greatest  thing if naomi won over charlize

[godardian]

as much as i really want her to win, it relaly looks like charlize is going to... im not saying she doesnt deserve it too but damn itd be the greatest  thing if naomi won over charlize

I dunno if it'd be the greatest thing, since I think they were both great, but Watts would be my pick.

[Chest Rockwell]

as much as i really want her to win, it relaly looks like charlize is going to... im not saying she doesnt deserve it too but damn itd be the greatest  thing if naomi won over charlize

I dunno if it'd be the greatest thing, since I think they were both great, but Watts would be my pick.

I'd be really happy if Bill Murray wins over Sean Penn (though the latter was great), and Naomi Watts wins over Charlize Theron. The latter was not really that astounding. At several points in time she overacted quite a bit; very inconsistent acting. Watts deserves it this year.

[03]

has anyone seen the current issue of FLAUNT; she looks as if made of porcelain on its cover.