Naomi Ellen Watts born 28 September 1968 is a British actress and film producer. She made her film debut in the Australian drama For Love Alone (1986) and then appeared in the Australian television series Hey Dad..! (1990), Brides of Christ (1991), Home and Away (1991), and the film Flirting (1991). After moving to the United States, Watts struggled as an actress for years, with appearances in small-scale films.
Watts rose to international prominence for playing an aspiring actress in David Lynch’s psychological thriller Mulholland Drive (2001) and a tormented journalist in the horror remake The Ring (2002). She received a nomination 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 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 Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS and Pantene’s Beautiful Lengths. Despite significant media attention, Watts is reticent about her personal life. She was in a relationship with American actor Liev Schreiber from 2005 to 2016, with whom she has two sons.
Early life
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. Miv was born in England but lived in Australia between the ages of one and seven. Watts’s maternal grandfather was Welsh and her maternal grandmother was Australian.
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 language 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 would later be divorced again) 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 was hired to work in advertising for a department store, that exposed her to the attention of Follow Me, a magazine which hired her as an assistant fashion editor. A casual invitation to participate in a drama workshop inspired Watts to quit her job and to pursue her acting ambitions.
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”.