Naomi Watts | Biography, Movies, & Facts (2024)

Naomi Watts (born September 28, 1968, Shoreham, Kent, England) is a British-born Australian actress acclaimed for her subtle performances and eclectic film roles. Her credits included surrealist thrillers such as Mulholland Drive (2001), crime dramas such as 21 Grams (2003), quirky comedies such as I Heart Huckabees (2004), and big-budget adventures such as King Kong (2005).

Watts was the daughter of an actress and a road manager for the British rock band Pink Floyd. Her parents divorced when she was four years old, and her father died when she was seven. Her family led a peripatetic life in England for the next several years before relocating to Australia when Watts was 14 years of age. There she took acting classes and began going to auditions. As a young woman, Watts traveled to Japan to work as a model, and her experience there briefly convinced her that she did not want to work in front of the camera. She then became a fashion editor at a magazine, but her love for acting was reignited when she attended a drama workshop at the urging of a friend.

Watts made her film debut in a small part in an Australian romance, For Love Alone (1986). Her career did not truly begin, however, until 1991, when she appeared in the boarding-school romance Flirting (with Nicole Kidman and Thandie Newton) as well as in two television series. She had parts in three Australian movies in 1993, including Wide Sargasso Sea. She then moved to Los Angeles. Watts’s first American movie role was as Jet Girl in Tank Girl (1995), based on a British comic strip. She worked steadily in a variety of movie and TV projects for the next decade, but success eluded her until David Lynch cast her in the starring double role in Mulholland Drive. The movie, originally intended as a television series, showcased her versatility and won her critical notice. In the popular horror movie The Ring (2002), she played the protagonist, and it was generally agreed that she outshone the material.

Though Watts had not attained superstardom, she embodied an unusually wide variety of parts in disparate movies. She received her first Academy Award nomination for her complex performance as a recovering drug addict in 21 Grams. Subsequent films include the domestic drama We Don’t Live Here Anymore (2004); The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004), a drama in which she portrayed the estranged wife of a deranged man who planned to kill the president; a remake of King Kong, in which she played leading lady Ann Darrow; the thrillers Eastern Promises (2007) and The International (2009); and the biopic J. Edgar (2011).

In The Impossible (2012) Watts starred as a British doctor who while on vacation with her family in Thailand is caught by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami; her performance earned her an Academy Award nomination for best actress. Later she undertook the difficult task of playing Diana, princess of Wales, in her final two years in the biographical film Diana (2013). In 2014 Watts appeared in the comedies St. Vincent—as a prostitute and stripper who maintains an unconventional friendship with a caddish layabout (Bill Murray)—and Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)—as a stage actress who is cast in a tempestuous production. She played one half of a dissatisfied middle-aged couple in Noah Baumbach’s dark comedy While We’re Young (2014), the mother of a transgender teen in About Ray (2015), and a woman who becomes involved with a widower (Jake Gyllenhaal) in Demolition (2015).

Watts’s credits from 2016 included the dystopian fantasy The Divergent Series: Allegiant, in which she played a rebel leader, and Shut In, a supernatural thriller about a child psychologist who thinks she is being haunted by the ghost of a former patient. In 2017 she appeared in the thriller The Book of Henry and in The Glass Castle, a drama about a dysfunctional family. In Ophelia (2018), a retelling of William Shakespeare’s play from the female perspective, Watts portrayed Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, and also played Gertrude’s invented sister. After the drama Penguin Bloom (2020), Watts was cast as a scientist in the sci-fi thriller Boss Level (2021).

In addition to her film work, Watts occasionally acted on the small screen. She notably had a recurring role in the 2017 revival of the cult TV series Twin Peaks. In 2019 Watts appeared in The Loudest Voice playing Gretchen Carlson, a former Fox News Channel personality who filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the network’s founder, Roger Ailes, eventually leading to his resignation.