Blooming late

NAOMI Watts may not have gone home with the Oscar for best actress this week, but she's still one of Hollywood's most in-demand stars with a string of movies lined up.

She was nominated for both an Academy Award and a Bafta for her performance as a grief-stricken mother in 21 Grams. "I'm a late bloomer, but this is exactly where I've always wanted to be," she says.

"I used to dream that I would be a working actor and I'd interview myself in the bathtub, but I never thought it would turn into this. This is far beyond what I ever dreamed for. To be nominated for an Academy Award? That would have been just too far-fetched."

Even without winning, there's no fear she'll be sitting at home waiting for the next role. Next up is the independent feature We Don't Live Here Anymore alongside Laura Dern. Also upcoming are The Assassination Of Richard Nixon with 21 Grams co-star Sean Penn, plus films with Dustin Hoffman and Ewan McGregor.

Kent-born Watts had an unconventional upbringing. Her father, who died when she was very young, was a sound engineer with Pink Floyd. When she was 14, her mother - a costume designer who once had ambitions to be an actress - decided to take Naomi and older brother Ben to live in Australia.

Always interested in acting, Watts trained at the Actor's Centre in Sydney and had a brief spell in TV soap Home And Away before going into movies. She moved to LA in the late 1990s, struggling to find good parts until her breakthrough role in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive three years ago.

Even that nearly didn't happen. It was originally made as the pilot for a TV series. When the network rejected it, Lynch filmed more scenes and turned it into a movie.

Now Watts has a thriving movie career, a handsome actor boyfriend in Heath Ledger and her best friend is Nicole Kidman. The two met while filming the coming-of-age drama Flirting in Australia, and have remained friends ever since.

21 Grams is directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who made the acclaimed Mexican film Amores Perros. She plays happily married mother-of-two whose life is shattered by a random accident that robs her of her family.

Watts agreed to do the movie without reading the script. "I was shooting The Ring at the time and I could only meet Alejandro on the set before I had to go to Paris," she recalls.

"I knew before I met him that I didn't know what he was doing but I wanted to work with this guy. I thought that Amores Perros was a perfect film. He knows better than anyone how to handle emotion and tragedy. So when he said, 'I want you to do my movie', I said, 'sight unseen, I'll do it, sign me up'.

"He said, 'It's you and two leading actors and lots of support cast'. And he said it was about hope and love, redemption, revenge, you know all of those things. But that's all he told me".

The emotional turmoil through which her character goes is a real rollercoaster. She doesn't really know how she managed to conjure up that kind of emotion take after take for the cameras.

"That was one of the great things abut working with Alejandro, we went to every level of emotion possible," she says.

"He made the choices I thought were right, and he paced it really well. I felt like I was crying at least once a day, every day for two months. Crying, primal screaming, shouting, all that kind of stuff.

"It was exhausting and draining, but I knew that going into it. I read the script and knew that was what I had to do."

Her preparation for the role included going to grief support groups and AA meetings. It gave her a lot more insight into something that is unimaginable, she says.

"I don't think anyone knows what that feels like until you have experienced it. For me to get closer to that experience, I had to connect with those people and listen to endless descriptive details of their journeys.

"It was incredibly painful. There was one woman in particular that had documented her journey in the months leading up to it. It was quite a different thing. It wasn't a sudden death. Months afterwards, she emailed me, and there was maybe 400 pages. Every day I would sit on the computer reading it to the point where I would say to myself, 'I can't read much more of this now'. It's absolutely heart-wrenching, and made me realise how truthful some of the moments in the script were."

She has nothing but praise for co-star Sean Penn, who won the best actor Oscar for his performance in Mystic River. "I had so much stuff to do through and I really felt he was guiding me and taking care of me. It was a special experience, working with him," says Watts.

"I'd been told he doesn't like to rehearse and might be unapproachable. I don't know if any of that is true, but certainly not with this experience."

* 21 Grams (15) opens in cinemas tomorrow .

Published: 04/03/2004