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The Power Of... Commitment: Killer Watts

She's a blonde bombshell with looks to die for - but the dazzling Naomi Watts has had to work hard to get where she is. After years of pursuing the dream, she now has an Oscar nomination on her CV and directors are queuing up to cast her. Francesca Martin meets the megastar who's lighting up Hollywood - and relishing every minute of it.

It's a late Friday afternoon and Naomi Watts, corseted in skin-tight Dolce & Gabbana, is doing yoga back-bends on a concrete slab in a chilly east-London location. Holding the pose for our photographer, she's managing this on only two hours' sleep, having been up all night playing a midwife on the run from a murderer, in David Cronenberg's latest film. My, does Watts work! Yet this is the girl - even at 38, she seems far too petite, too dewy-skinned to be called a woman - who insists that she leads a charmed life. Charmed it might seem, but, for Watts, being one of Hollywood's A-list stars is not an easy ride. After all, can you imagine Jennifer Aniston trying to distract a giant ape with back-flips, as Watts did in King Kong, or roughing it along the Yangtse River in China, as she has done in her latest film, The Painted Veil? Maybe it was the 12 hard years as a jobbing actor before landing her break-out role in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive; or her curious fusion of English grittiness and Australian guts - but the result is that Watts is one actress not to be trifled with.

The next time I meet Watts is in the kitchen of her rented home on west London. Her two dogs, Ned and Bob, bark around her feet as she explains that her mother, Myfanwy, who owns an antique shop in Norfolk, recently redecorated the house. Watts was born in Shoreham, Kent, and raised in Wales until her family moved to Australia when she was 14; her accent is a becoming mixture of English vowels overlaid with a soft Aussie twang. Her father, Peter, was a sound engineer who worked with Pink Floyd, and she describes her family as 'artistic'. 'My brother was always very good at drawing [he is now a photographer], and there's always been that creative gene and talent around me,' she says. But it was not a childhood without its problems. When Watts was four, her parents divorced; and when she was just seven years old, her father died. She has admitted in the past that 'at this point, I basically withdrew'.

The family's move to Australia proved to be life-changing for Watts. After a depressing stint as a model in Japan - 'Boy, those girls were bitches!' - and a brief fling as a fashion editor on a magazine, she stumbled across a drama workshop and decided to give acting a go. At an early casting, she met Nicole Kidman, who became one of her closest friends. It was Watts who accompanied Kidman to the opening of The Others in 2001 - Kidman's first public appereance post-divorce from Tom Cruise - walking down the red carpet, hand in hand. After Kidman had moved to LA and found success, Watts followed her soon after, assuring herself that 'If she can do it, so can I!'

But, for the next 10 years, Watts struggled to get taken seriously as an actor - a period that she documents to comedic effect in the 2005 film Ellie Parker, written and directed by her friend Scott Coffey. 'There are absolute moments of truth in Ellie Parker - getting changed for auditions in my car [Watts' Honda was used in the film] and that constant feeling of judgement, that I must alter my personality to suit whoever is in the position of power. I spent so many years humiliating myself, trying to prove that I could do it. You end up diluting yourself into nothing; it was exhausting. I had no confidence to be myself'. Although Watts did get a few acting parts - 'nibbles', as she calls them - there were long periods of unemployment, getting evicted from an apartment, and having to borrow money from friends. 'I definitely had my bags packed a couple of times,' she admits ruefully.

Watts' luck finally changed when Lynch cast her in the pilot Mulholland Drive, originally envisaged as a TV series. But financial backer ABC lost its nerve, feeling it was too dark, and it was shelved for a year and a half. 'I couldn't believe it!' wails Watts. 'I thought I was going to be in the only David Lynch project that wasn't going to see the light of day.' Luckily, Canal+ came to the rescue, adding more money to the budget so that Lynch could write an essential 20 extra pages. the resulting film won rave reviews, particularly for Watts' performance as an innocent starlet with a dark alter ego, and her relief was palpable. 'I'll never forget,' she says, laughing, 'Variety wrote an absolute love-letter of a review, and right away every agent in town who had turned me down two or three times started calling.'

What followed was a series of high-profile, meaty roles (culminating in Peter Jackson's budget-busting King Kong), and a short-lived relationship with actor Heath Ledger, 11 years her junior. While King Kong made Watts a household name, it was her earlier performance as distraught wife Cristina Peck in 21 Grams (2003) that brought her an Oscar nomination and affirmation as one of Hollywood's most sought-after actresses. Director Alejandro González Inárritu attributes Watts' emotional vitality to her past struggles. 'She's like a good wine; you put her in the cellar for a few years, the bring her out, and she's even better, more complex, than before,' he says. Watts, meanwhile, was elated by her success. 'I spent 10 years fighting to get my hands on good material and the possibility of working with inspiring people and then, all of a sudden, I'm having to say no to people I never imagined would offer me work.'

If the tables of power had turned in Watts' favour, this was in no small part due to her physical and emotional dedication to her roles. For both 21 Grams and King Kong, although Watts agreed to the roles before even reading a script, both directors had in turn sought her out specifically. 'There was never any doubt in my mind as to wheter Naomi was right to play Ann; for me, she was the only actress who could do it,' says Peter Jackson about his decision to cast Watts as Ann Darrow. 'Naomi consistently draws you into the interior life of the characters she plays. There are a few actresses out there who will give their heart and soul to a role, much less make a success of it.' During the filming of King Kong, she fell down a six-foot ditch and landed on her coccyx, legs in the air. 'Everyone crowded around me, saying, "Don't move!"; Peter Jackson was weeping - I thought that was it. It definitely made me think hard about mortality for a few days - I mean, if I do die, is this how I want to do it?' Watts, though, is also aware of her predilection for grittier parts. 'Definitely, people come to me because they think I am the person who can play a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and I am very attracted to darker materials; but also, frankly, comedies are easier to mess up.'

Watts' ability to make an audience empathise with emotional, complex women is at the core of The Painted Veil, which is based on a Somerset Maugham novel and slated for release later this spring. She plays Kitty, a middle-class English girl who marries a doctor she hardly knows to escape the clutches of her mother - only to end up at a cholera colony, deep in rural China. In many ways, Kitty is an unsympathetic character at the beginning of the film, spoilt and unaware, especially when she embarks on an affair. It is to Watts' credit that, by the end of the film, you find yourself rooting (and most likely sobbing your heart out) for her. 'There is a fine line between making a character 3-D, and losing the sympathy of the audience,' Watts admits, 'but you really have to find the truth of the character. Kitty is in a place of absolute self-destruction, and it is up to her to look inwards to forgive both her husband and herself.'

The Painted Veil is beautifully shot, and was filmed on location in China. It is also the first Western film to be co-produced with the Chinese Film Bureau, and will be released in China as a Chinese project. Director John Curran acknowledges, however, that the shoot was far from easy. 'Locations such as Huang Yao, for example, were a real challenge. It's an 800-year-old city that essentially exists the way it did 800 years ago, so everyone just had to live with the facilities that were there.' Communication was also a problem. 'Sometimes,' says Watts, 'we would be filming with locals who had never even seen a white person before.' Life on set was definitely made easier by the enthusiastic presence of lead actor Edward Norton, who had been trying to get the film made for five years and had a special interest in it, having studied Chinese history at Yale. 'I absolutely worship that man,' says Watts. 'Such an extraordinary talent, and he has so much passion.' Also of help, no doubt, was the addition to the cast of Liev (pronounced Li-ev) Schreiber, Watts' boyfriend of three years, playing the role of Charlie Townsend, with whom Kitty has an affair. Schreiber, who is probably best known in the UK for his lead role in the remake of The Manchurian Candidate, has a shooting schedule as busy as Watts' - he is now working on director Mike Newell's production of Love in the Time of Cholera, out later this year.

The Painted Veil is the second film that Watts has co-produced (along with Edward Norton), and she played a crucial part in getting it made, suggesting Curran as director - an old friend with whom she had worked with on We Don't Live Here Anymore. The role of co-producer is clearly one she relishes. 'You feel like your voice is stronger and valued; you aren't just an actor for hire, but involved in the creative process,' she says. 'each day would begin with a discussion of how we saw the scene, and the three of us - Norton, Curran and myself - are very different people, so we did clash, but we also had to find a way to honour everybody's ideas.'

Watts readily acknowledges that co-producing or directing is one way for women to attain more of a power base in Hollywood, but thinks that, for older women especially, it is becoming an easier place to be. 'As I've gotten older, the roles - knock on wood - are getting more interesting; the longer the life, the deeper the character, the richer the material. The theory used to be that it stops at 35 for women in Hollywood, but I think that has changed. for a while, it felt as if women's roles were going to all the 25-year-olds, but now, 40 seems to be the new 35, it really is. Look at all those great women around the age of 40 - Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Renee Zellweger, Emily Watson (one of my favourites) - they will all keep working.'

Watts is also a great believer in the ability of directors to empower actors - 'Directors are your teachers!' she exclaims - and opted last year to work on Funny Games with Michael Haneke (who directed the 2005 hit film Hidden), because 'he is one of the greatest directors alive right now.' Co-starring Tim Roth and Michael Pitt, it's about a middle-class family who are taken hostage on holiday and tortured by two boys. Watts did not enjoy the experience and admits: 'I have a huge amount of trouble with how dark and bleak it is - and talk about the lack of power in terms of the character I play!' But she does have a list of other directors with whom she would like to work - Alfonso Cuarón, walter Salles, Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson.

For now, though, she is still being called up to work for her former directors. For Inárritu, she recently played the voice, down the phone, of Cate Blanchett's sister in this year's Babel. For Lynch, however, she was stretched a little more. His latest film, the mystery drama Inland Empire (in cinemas from 9 March), appears to be every bit as spooky and quirky as his past works. 'You don't ever see my face because I'm wearing an extremely uncomfortable rabbit suit,' watts reveals of her part. 'The head alone weighed more than 40lbs. I couldn't see or breathe and it was about 100 degrees under there. David would have us walking around on these 1950s sitcom sets and he would say, "OK, now walk into the kitchen." I would walk straight into the wall and he would shout, "No, not that way, turn around," and then I would walk into the ironing board.' Watts sees herself as for ever indebted to these two directors. 'David, especially, changed my life. He not only launched my career, but he made me believe in myself.'

After a hectic few years, Watts is looking forward to an inminent break from shooting David Cronenberg's latest thriller Eastern Promises, with Viggo Mortensen. She is flying out to LA to join Schreiber, and planning lots of dinner parties - 'Italian, roasts and lots of fish dishes' - reading ('probably research for my future projects'), and hopefully squeezing in a quick trip to Mexico. 'I cannnot wait to be on holiday,' she sighs, as she tries to get her dog Ned to sit in the basket. 'But look: you see how much power I have.' She laughs, 'I can't even tell my dogs what to do!'

By: Francesca Martin
� Harper's Bazaar UK

Harper's Bazaar UK (March 2007)