Naomi Watts spent a decade being told she wasn't enough
Naomi Watts moved to Hollywood in the early 1990s, lost her medical insurance, struggled to pay rent and once auditioned five times for Meet the Parents only to hear she lacked sex appeal. Then David Lynch cast her in Mulholland Drive, and two Oscar nominations followed within a dozen years.
Watts was born in Shoreham, Kent, on 28 September 1968. Her father, Peter, was a road manager and sound engineer for Pink Floyd; her parents split when she was four, and in August 1976 he was found dead in a Notting Hill flat of an apparent heroin overdose. Her mother then took the children to Anglesey in North Wales, where for three years Naomi went to a Welsh-language school. Later moves took the family to Suffolk and, in 1982, to Sydney.
In Australia she never finished school, worked as a papergirl and ran a corner deli, tried modelling in Japan without success, and became an assistant fashion editor before a drama workshop pulled her into acting. Auditioning for commercials, she befriended Nicole Kidman. Her film debut came in For Love Alone in 1986, followed by the soap Home and Away and John Duigan's Flirting, which Roger Ebert named among the ten best films of 1992. She turned down a long stint on A Country Practice, a choice she later called naive.
America proved harder. Contacts made through Kidman forgot her name, casting offices would not even fax her scripts, and she drove for hours to collect a few pages for projects she despised. It took nine auditions to land a supporting part in Tank Girl in 1995, a flop that later found a cult following. She even did helium-voiced mouse lines for Babe: Pig in the City. Through it all, Kidman kept her company and urged her on.
Mulholland Drive in 2001, playing a hopeful young actress, made her an international name. Grief-heavy roles in 21 Grams and The Impossible earned Best Actress nominations, and playing Babe Paley in Feud: Capote vs. The Swans brought an Emmy nomination. Despite her Australian years, she calls herself firmly British.
Source: Naomi Watts
