NEW YORK -- "It's research. Please don't tell anyone I've started smoking again," says Emily Watson, puffing madly on a cigarette before butting out to begin her interview.

She quickly explains that her character in Angela's Ashes is a smoker, but concedes: "I quit smoking six years ago but ever since I started smoking again for Angela's Ashes, I know I'm hooked again."

Watson, 31, is the waifish British stage actress who won an Oscar nomination three years ago for her film debut in Breaking the Waves.

Her Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations this year for her heart-wrenching performance in Hilary and Jackie make her a front-runner for a second Oscar nod come Feb. 9.

In this fact-based drama that opens Friday, Watson plays famed British cellist Jacqueline du Pre, whose career and life were cut short by multiple sclerosis.

In the 1960s, du Pre was considered the world's premier cellist. She married renowned pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim.

They became the toast of the music world but in 1973, at age 28, du Pre was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Within two years, she had to cancel her concert tours and was soon confined to a wheelchair. She died in 1987.

"I discovered through my research that Jacqueline had primary progressive multiple sclerosis, which is the worst because it progresses at an insidious rate.

"Jacqueline was initially relieved to discover there was something physically wrong with her.

"For a long time, she thought she was going insane."

Hilary and Jackie is an uncompromising portrait of this talented artist and her tragic life and even details her sanctioned seduction of her brother-in-law.

Watson spent three months learning to play the cello and to use a wheelchair.

"I had actually studied the cello for six months when I was 14, so I was eventually able to mime the playing.

"In addition, I had to spend time watching tapes of Jacqueline in concert. Part of what made her so extraordinary was that she embraced the cello in a truly sensuous way.

"When critics called it her lover, they were more intuitive than they realized.

"The cello fulfilled Jacqueline's life, yet it also left her lonely and miserable."

For Watson, Hilary and Jackie is "a cautionary tale about talent and celebrity. Having your talent recognized and praised can actually take you to a dark place if you don't have sane voices around to drag you back to reality."

Watson's own life was turned around by her Oscar nomination.

Suddenly she was "getting offers to work with the best people in the business like Daniel Day Lewis (The Boxer). No one would have considered me for big movies without the Oscar nomination.

"There's something that Jacqueline says in Hilary and Jackie that really struck a chord with me. Jacqueline recalled that 'One day I was just playing. The next day I'm booked up for the next two years.'

"My experience with Breaking the Waves was very similar."

Watson says she copes with her celebrity by "going home and doing the ironing. It helps recentre me."

Watson is married to British actor/writer Jack Waters, who she met when they starred together in a British stage version of Taming of the Shrew.

After Breaking the Waves, The Boxer and Hilary and Jackie, Watson says she's looking for some lighter material.

"I don't want to become known as the queen of tragedy, but I certainly didn't find my reprieve with Angela's Ashes. It's another stark drama."

In the film, Watson plays an impoverished woman who loses three of her children to disease.

"The great irony is that I don't have anything in my own life to draw on.

"I had a strangely untroubled and happy upbringing and I live quite a normal life now.

"Maybe it's because I am so centred in real life that I love taking my characters to the edge of insanity."


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