Naomi Ellen Watts (born 28 September 1968) is a British actress. After her family moved to Australia, she made her film debut there in the drama For Love Alone (1986) and then appeared in three television series, Hey Dad..! (1990), Brides of Christ (1991), and Home and Away (1991), and the film Flirting (1991). After moving to the United States, Watts initially struggled as an actress, taking roles in small-scale films until she starred in David Lynch's psychological thriller Mulholland Drive in 2001 as an aspiring actress. This role started her rise to international prominence.
Watts then played a tormented journalist in the horror remake The Ring (2002). She was nominated 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 she 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 the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS and Pantene's Beautiful Lengths. Despite significant media attention, Watts is reticent about her personal life. From 2005 to 2016 she was in a relationship with American actor Liev Schreiber, with whom she has two sons.
Early life and education
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. Watts's maternal grandfather was Welsh.
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 medium 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 later divorced) 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 fourteen, 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 worked in advertising for a department store, which led Follow Me magazine to hire her as an assistant fashion editor. A casual invitation to participate in a drama workshop inspired Watts to quit her job and pursue acting.
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."
