Emily Watson

Emily Margaret Watson (born 14 January 1967) is an English actress. She began her career on stage and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1992. In 2002, she starred in productions of Twelfth Night and Uncle Vanya at the Donmar Warehouse, and was nominated for the Olivier Award for Best Actress for the latter. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her debut film role as a newlywed in Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996) and for her portrayal of Jacqueline du Pré in Anand Tucker's Hilary and Jackie (1998).

Watson's other films include The Boxer (1997), Angela's Ashes (1999), Gosford Park (2001), Punch-Drunk Love (2002), Red Dragon (2002), The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004), Corpse Bride (2005), Miss Potter (2006), Synecdoche, New York (2008), Oranges and Sunshine (2010), War Horse (2011), The Theory of Everything (2014), Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017), God's Creatures (2022), Small Things like These (2024), and Hamnet (2025).

For her role in the HBO miniseries Chernobyl, she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award. She won the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress for playing Janet Leach in the 2011 ITV television biopic Appropriate Adult and was nominated for the International Emmy Award for Best Actress for the 2017 BBC miniseries Apple Tree Yard. In 2024, she portrayed the lead role of Valya Harkonnen in the HBO science fiction series Dune: Prophecy.

Early life

Watson was born 14 January 1967 in London. Her father, Richard Watson, was an architect, and her mother, Katharine (née Venables), was an English teacher at St David's Girls' School, west London. She has an older sister, Harriet. Watson was brought up as an Anglican. She has described her childhood self as "a nice middle-class English girl ... I'd love to say I was a rebellious teenager, but I wasn't." She is a childhood friend of actress and writer Clara Salaman, and starred in the screen adaptation of Salaman's novel Too Close.

Watson was educated at St James Independent Schools in west London which were founded by the School of Economic Science. While there, she witnessed "incidents of extreme cruelty" that were "very scarring for people going forward in their lives". She attended the University of Bristol, where she obtained a BA (1988, English). Watson subsequently trained at Drama Studio London. In 2003, she received an honorary MA from Bristol University. Watson was a member of the School of Economic Science until 1996, when aged 29 she was expelled following her part in Breaking the Waves. She describes the organisation as a "very repressive regime" and a "system where you were supposed to think a certain way and you weren't really allowed to think any other way". Breaking out of it, she says, was a "very powerful release" in her life.

Career

Watson's career began on the stage. Her theatre credits include The Children's Hour (at the Royal National Theatre), Three Sisters, Much Ado About Nothing and The Lady from the Sea. Watson has also worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company in A Jovial Crew, The Taming of the Shrew, All's Well That Ends Well and The Changeling.

Watson was virtually unknown until director Lars von Trier chose her to star in Breaking the Waves (1996) after Helena Bonham Carter dropped out. Watson's performance as Bess McNeill won her the Los Angeles, London and New York Critics' Circle Awards for Best Actress, as well as the US National Society of Film Critics' Award for Best Actress and nominations at the Academy Awards, the British Academy Film Awards, and the Golden Globe Awards.

Watson came to public notice again in another role, that of cellist Jacqueline du Pré in Hilary and Jackie, for which she learned to play the cello in three months, and received another Oscar nomination. She also played a leading role in Cradle Will Rock, a story of a theatre show in the 1930s, directed by Tim Robbins. She played the title role of Frank McCourt's mother in the adaptation of his memoir, Angela's Ashes. In 2001, she appeared with John Turturro in The Luzhin Defence and in Robert Altman's ensemble piece Gosford Park.

Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet wrote the character Amélie for Watson to play (Amélie was originally named Emily) but she eventually turned the role down due to difficulties speaking French and a desire not to be away from home. The role made a star of Audrey Tautou. She was also the first choice to play Elizabeth I in Shekhar Kapur's film Elizabeth, the role that won Cate Blanchett an Academy Award nomination.

The following year, she starred as Reba McClane in Red Dragon, an adaptation of Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs prequel, as the romantic interest of Adam Sandler in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love and in the sci-fi action thriller Equilibrium with Christian Bale. In 2002, she took time off from cinema to play two roles in Sam Mendes's repertory productions of Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night, first at Mendes's Donmar Warehouse in London and later at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Her performance was widely acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic and she was nominated for an Olivier Award for Uncle Vanya.

In 2004, Watson received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance as Peter Sellers's first wife, Anne Howe, in the HBO film The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. 2005 saw Watson star in four films: Wah-Wah, Richard E. Grant's autobiographical directorial debut; Separate Lies, directed by Gosford Park writer Julian Fellowes; Tim Burton's animated film Corpse Bride, with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter; and John Hillcoat's Australian Western, The Proposition.

In 2006, Watson took a supporting role in Miss Potter, a biographical drama about children's author Beatrix Potter, from Babe director Chris Noonan, with Ewan McGregor and Renée Zellweger; and also in an adaptation of Thea Beckman's children's novel Crusade in Jeans. In 2007, she appeared in The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, an adaptation of the Dick King-Smith children's novel about the origin of the Loch Ness Monster. In 2007, Mood Indigo, a script written by Watson and her husband, was optioned by Capitol Films. The film is a love story set during the Second World War and concerns a young woman who falls in love with a pilot.

In 2008, Watson starred with Julia Roberts and Carrie-Anne Moss in Fireflies in the Garden, the Lifetime Television movie The Memory Keeper's Daughter (based on the novel with the same name), and in screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York. In 2009 she appeared in the film Cold Souls, from first-time director Sophie Barthes, and Within the Whirlwind, a biographical film of Russian poet and Gulag survivor Evgenia Ginzburg from The Luzhin Defence director Marleen Gorris. Watson considers her performance in the role of Ginzburg "the most stretching thing I've done as a mature actress"; however, the film was not picked up for distribution.

In 2010, she starred in Oranges and Sunshine, a film recounting the true story of children sent into abusive care homes in Australia, directed by Jim Loach, and also the following year (2011) in War Horse, an adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's prizewinning novel, directed by Steven Spielberg. In 2011, she played Janet Leach in the ITV two-part film Appropriate Adult, about serial killer Fred West, for which she won a BAFTA.

In 2014, Watson had supporting roles in The Book Thief, alongside Geoffrey Rush and Sophie Nélisse, and the Oscar-nominated film The Theory of Everything, portraying Jane Wilde, Hawking's mother in law, alongside Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones. In 2015, she had supporting roles in Testament of Youth, alongside Alicia Vikander and Kit Harington, Eduardo Verástegui's Little Boy and A Royal Night Out, in which she portrayed Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. She also received rave reviews for her portrayal of Julie Nicholson in the BBC Drama A Song for Jenny, with experts tipping her to win the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress.

In 2019 she appeared as a nuclear scientist — a composite of several real scientists — in the miniseries Chernobyl.

Watson was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to drama. In 2017, she starred in the BBC mini-series Apple Tree Yard.

Personal life

Watson married Jack Waters, whom she had met at the Royal Shakespeare Company, in 1995. Waters is a former actor who now works as a potter. They have a daughter born in 2005, and a son in 2009. They live in Greenwich, London.

Watson is a supporter of the children's charity the NSPCC. In 2004, she was inducted into the society's hall of fame for spearheading the successful campaign to appoint a Children's Commissioner for England. Receiving her award in the crowded House of Commons, she spoke out against the possibility that the Children's Commissioner become a figurehead with little real power. She is also one of the patrons of the London children's charity Scene & Heard. In April 2018, Watson presented Maternity Worldwide as her chosen charity on the BBC Radio 4 Appeal.

Credits

Film

Television

Theatre

• School for Mothers and The Mistake (double-bill of one-act plays), White Bear Theatre, London, 1991
• All's Well That Ends Well (Royal Shakespeare Company, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon 1992, later Pit Theatre, London, 1993) as Marianna
• The Taming of the Shrew (Royal Shakespeare Company, Barbican Theatre, London, 1993) as Mrs. Ruth Banks-Ellis
• The Changeling (Royal Shakespeare Company, Pit Theatre, 1993)
• A Jovial Crew (Royal Shakespeare Company, Pit Theatre, 1993) as Amie
• The Lady from the Sea (Lyric Theatre, London, 1994) as Hilde Wangel
• The Children's Hour (Royal National Theatre, London, 1994) as Mary Tilford
• Three Sisters (Out of Joint, 1995)
• Othello (1996, theatre)
• Twelfth Night / Uncle Vanya (Donmar Warehouse, 2002 / BAM, 2003)

Radio

• The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1994, radio)
• Wuthering Heights (1995, radio series)
• The Glass Piano (2010, radio drama about Princess Alexandra of Bavaria)

Awards and nominations

External links

• Media related to Emily Watson at Wikimedia Commons
• at IMDb