Emily Watson : Tv’s guru
Emily Watson (born 14 January 1967) is an English actress who gave an acclaimed debut film performance in Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves. She has won a number of awards for acting throughout her career, which has encompassed theatre, motion picture and television; most recently a BAFTA award for her role in ITV’s Appropriate Adult.Sexiness isn’t Emily’s bag. Although she may be invitingly curvy, this 5’8” Londoner is grateful she doesn’t have to pretend to be a sexual icon: “I’m lucky I don’t do the kind of work where the main thing is that you’re the girl and you look gorgeous,” she says. “I don’t look like that.”
Emily Watson is among an elite handful of actresses who have enjoyed a flourishing career on both sides of the Atlantic. After beginning her career in the theater, Emily made a huge splash in 1996 in Breaking the Waves, for which she received Best Actress awards from the European Film Academy, the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle, as well as a Best Actress nomination from the Academy Awards. Emily Watson has since been nominated for an additional Oscar for her role in 1998’s Hilary and Jackie, and she won a Best Supporting Actress award from the Toronto Film Critics Association for 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love.Additional credits include The Boxer (1997), Angela’s Ashes, Gosford Park, Red Dragon, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, The Proposition (2005), Wah-Wah (2005), Corpse Bride (2005), and Separate Lies (2005).
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Watson was virtually unknown until director Lars von Trier chose her to star in his controversial Breaking the Waves (1996) after Helena Bonham Carter dropped out “at the very last minute.” Watson’s performance as Bess McNeill won her the Los Angeles, London and New York Critics’ Circle Awards, the US National Society of Film Critics’ Award for Best Actress, and ultimately an Oscar nomination.Watson came to public notice again in another controversial role, as cellist Jacqueline du Pré in Hilary and Jackie, for which she learned to play the cello in three months, and received another Oscar nomination. She also played a leading role in Cradle Will Rock, a story of a theatre show in the 1930s, directed by Tim Robbins. Though she won the title role of Frank McCourt’s mother in the adaptation of his acclaimed memoir, Angela’s Ashes, the film underperformed. In 2001, she appeared alongside John Turturro in The Luzhin Defence and in Robert Altman’s ensemble piece Gosford Park. The following year, she starred as Reba McClane in the adaptation of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs prequel, Red Dragon, as the romantic interest of Adam Sandler in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, and in the sci-fi action thriller Equilibrium alongside Christian Bale.In 2004, Watson received a Golden Globe nomination for her role as Peter Sellers’s first wife, Anne Howe, in the HBO film The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. 2005 saw Watson starring in four films: Wah-Wah, Richard E. Grant’s autobiographical directorial debut; Separate Lies, directed by Gosford Park writer Julian Fellowes; Tim Burton’s animated film Corpse Bride, alongside Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter; and John Hillcoat’s Australian-set “western”, The Proposition. In 2006, she took a supporting role in Miss Potter, a biopic of children’s author Beatrix Potter from Babe director Chris Noonan, with Ewan McGregor and Renée Zellweger, and also in an adaptation of Thea Beckman’s children’s novel Crusade in Jeans. In 2007, she appeared in The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, an adaptation of the Dick King-Smith children’s novel about the origin of the Loch Ness Monster.In 2008, Watson starred with Julia Roberts and Carrie-Anne Moss in Fireflies in the Garden, and in screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York. In 2009 she appeared in the film Cold Souls, from first-time director Sophie Barthes, and Within the Whirlwind, a biopic of Russian poetess and Gulag survivor Evgenia Ginzburg from The Luzhin Defence director Marleen Gorris. Watson considers Ginzburg to be her best recent role; however, the film was not picked up for distribution.In 2010, she starred in Oranges and Sunshine, a film recounting the true story of children sent into abusive care homes in Australia, directed by Jim Loach, and also the following year (2011) in War Horse, an adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s prizewinning novel, directed by Steven Spielberg. She played Janet Leach in the ITV two-part film Appropriate Adult, about serial killer Fred West, for which she won a BAFTA.
Watson married Jack Waters, whom she had met at the Royal Shakespeare Company, in 1995. Their daughter, Juliet, was born in autumn 2005, and her son Dylan in 2009. Watson’s mother fell ill with encephalitis shortly before filming commenced on Oranges and Sunshine. Watson returned home to England to attend to her, but she died five minutes before she arrived in London.
