Although she had been acting for more than fifteen
years, Naomi Watts broke through to stardom when she
was tapped by David Lynch to portray an aspiring
starlet in "Mulholland Drive" (2001), his 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 Originally made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.
Born in England, the leggy blonde suffered the
trauma of losing her father when she was only ten
years old. Four years later, she relocated to
Australia with her mom and began to study acting.
Eventually, she began going on auditions (at one she
met her best friend Nicole Kidman) and landed her
first film role in "For Love Alone" (1986). Watts
enjoyed her first substantial part alongside best
pal Kidman in "Flirting" (1991), the John Duigan-directed
sequel to "The Year My Voice Broke". Cast as a
snobby schoolgirl, the teen actress made an
impression and her career was born. Watts went on to
co-star with Oscar-winner Brenda Fricker, Josephine
Byrnes, Kym Wilson and a young Russell Crowe in the
Australian miniseries "Brides of Christ" (1991).
Duigan tapped her once again when he cast her in a
supporting role in "Wide Sargasso Sea" (1992).
Moving to the USA, Watts acted in her first
Hollywood movie, the comedy "Matinee" (also 1992) in
a bit role as an aspiring movie star. She enjoyed a
cult hit as Jet Girl in the film adaptation of the
comic book "Tank Girl" (1995) but box-office success
and that seminal role to catapult her to stardom
still eluded her.
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. Watts was then cast in what was hoped
would be her breakthrough, an ABC TV series created
by and directed by David Lynch. Although the network
passed on the quirky drama, Lynch was able to shoot
additional material and create a strange, trippy
picture that painted a dark look at the dream
factory of Hollywood. Indeed her dual role as perky
wannabe Betty Elms and the cynical Diane Selwyn
provided Watts with rich and complex material that
she skillfully handled. If anyone had any doubts
about her capabilities, one scene in particular
clinched it: Betty auditions for a movie role and
while the dialogue is trite, her reactions to her
scene partner (Chad Everett) and her approach to the
part allowed Watts to play many layers and moods at
once. That astonishing scene alone made critics and
audience take notice.
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" (lensed
2001) and played a TV newswoman investigating a rash
of elevator accidents in "Down" (2001). 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 Nicole 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 wells, 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 film
established her firmly as a bankable star, and she
returned to give an equally strong central
performance in the otherwise less inspired 2005
sequel "The Ring 2."
Watts was equally good in the relaxed, sophistacted
Merchant-Ivory production of Diane Johnson's
bestselling novel "Le Divorce" (2003), playing an
aspiring American poetess in contemporary Paris who
is abandoned by her husband, a French scoundrel who
jilts her while she's pregnant. Once again Watts'
enviable ability to conjure genuine, heart-rendering
emotion served her well in the role. The actress
successfully reinvented herself yet again in the
brooding drama "21 Grams" (2003), playing a reformed
party girl who slips back into her self-abasing ways
after losing her family in a car accident. With that
performance Watts found herself at the center of
much critical acclaim and awards buzz, and earned
her first Oscar nomination as Best Actress.
Watts' immediate post-Oscar entries included the
little-seen, long-delayed Aussie crime drama about
legendary bankrobber "Ned Kelly" (2004), which
paired her to surprisingly little effect with
Ledger; and the unremarkable indie drama "We Don't
Live Here Anymore" (2004), in which she played one
of two academic, suburban couples who
self-destructively enter into extramarital affairs
with their neighbors' spouses. She then assumed a a
role that Kidman couldn't fit into her schedule (and
one that Gwyneth Paltrow had already vacated) when
she appeared in writer-director David O. Russell's
fourth feature "I [Heart] Huckabees" (2004), an "exisitential
comedy" exploring the spirtual lives of a group of
people involved with a department store called
Huckabees. Watts played Dawn, the store's lovely
spokesmodel, who is ultimately pushed to the
breaking point by the complications spinning out of
her sheer physical beauty. She followed up with a
brief supporting turn in "The Assassination of
Richard Nixon" (2004) as the long-suffering waitress
ex-wife of a man (Sean Penn) slowly descending into
a madness that will lead to an attempted attack on
the White House. 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
proportaions, cast in the Fay Raye role of Ann
Darrow for director Peter Jackson's long-dreamt-of,
much anticipated remake of "King Kong."
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