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arts and crafts
If ever there was the perfect example of how just one role could ignite a film career then that was certainly the case for Naomi Watts last year after David Lynch’s hallucinatory Hollywood thriller, Mulholland Drive.
To be strictly accurate, of course, it was two roles for as you may well recall Watts had to undergo a severe personality change – from sweet Betty Elms to satanic Diane Selwyn – during the course of Lynch’s typically enigmatic movie.
Twelve months on, Watts, deserving recipient of a clutch of actress awards for her spectacu- lar bout of celluloid schizophre- nia, can now reflect more soberly and with a useful bit of distance on just how the success of the BAFTA-winning Mulholland Drive effectively changed her life.
English-born, Aussie-bred and now Hollywood savvy after more than six years based in LA, Watts explains: “Before that film I was always working but with big gaps between and there wasn’t a lot of choice involved. I never did horrible things but I did stuff which I didn’t necessarily want to do.
“At the time, I was actually very broke because to do the second part of the shoot for Mulholland Drive in order to turn it into a film [it started life as a TV pilot] we all took no money. As a result I lost my health insurance and had to move out of my apartment in order to downgrade. I’d got to a point where I was having to rethink things a bit – in fact, about how I was going to manage to survive at all in Hollywood.”
She’s talking very animatedly while sipping coffee in a street café in Paris where’s she’s on location for Merchant-Ivory’s lat- est film, Le Divorce.
This adaptation of novelist Diane Johnson’s best-selling dark edged romantic comedy – in which she co-stars with Kate Hudson, Glenn Close and Thierry Lhermitte – is just the latest in a flurry of new films which she’s completed in the slipstream of Mulholland Drive.
Among them are a Plots With a View, a Wales-based undertaking comedy, The Ring, an American remake of the Japanese video-
tape shocker, and The Kelly Gang, about the eponymous Ned, one of Down Under’s favourite sons.
Watts first arrived in Australia with her mother at the age of 14 Her father Peter, who had worked as a sound engineer for Pink Floyd, died when she was 10.
She admits she gets confused when asked to define her nation- ality: “I call myself an Australian actress because that’s where I trained and where my profession began. But I’m also still very English and very influenced by English culture. Although I’ve now lived in America for some seven years I certainly don’t feel American there. There’s no way I could say I wasn’t somehow influ- enced by that culture too.
“The Australian press kind of claim me but then someone faxed me a Vanity Fair piece about Hollywood which noted three ‘English actresses’ and I was included along with Rachel Weisz and Kate Beckinsale. I’ve certainly never felt America was home although it’s definitely my base and has been very kind to me of late.”
David Lynch cast Watts with- out a reading after getting her to talk for a hour about herself. James Ivory snapped her up after seeing Mulholland Drive to play Kate Hudson’s elder, unhappily married and pregnant half sister Roxy in Le Divorce.
“This is the first role where I real- ly feel I’ve played a woman,” she declares, happily. “I’ve played mothers before so when I say ‘woman’ I mean a person who has a certain amount of self- awareness and responsibility. I feel I’m more ‘grown-up’ in this movie than I’ve ever been before.”
When she’s not juggling fea- ture film demands, Watts’ thoughts turn to a very personal piece of movie business. With a friend, and sometime co-star, Scott Coffey, she made a short film called Ellie Parker, in which she also stars as an actress - “not my life story but some elements of it.” After being successful shown at Sundance, there are now plans for it to be expanded into full-length film.
At (just) 34, Watts agrees, rather disarmingly, that in
Hollywood terms she’s not exactly in the first flush of typical young leading ladyhood.
“There’s a lot of ageism in Hollywood. If you paid too much attention to it, I think you’d go stir crazy and become neurotic very quickly. People there think of me as just starting out – as an overnight success. In fact, it’s been a long night.
“That’s why I do feel my choices now have to be very careful. I could earn huge pay cheques and have a nice $2m apartment in New York if I want- ed it. But there’s every chance that if I take that route it could all be over in two or three years. By the time you’re 40 things really start to slow down, possibly even before that.”
Here’s one leading lady who is determined to be in it for the long haul.
From Mulholland Drive to
Paris café society, award-winning actress Naomi Watts talks to Quentin Falk
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