NEW YORK -- Emily Watson is hardly in distress and mostly pleasant as she sits at a dining room table in a mid-Manhattan hotel suite.
Watson has just completed a gruelling magazine shoot in the next room. But she is neither cranky nor whiny about her hour under the hot lights. She even shrugs off the grind of doing two days of interviews for her film, Angela's Ashes.
In the drama, the likable 32-year-old actor plays the depressed mother. It's the Alan Parker film version of Frank McCourt's Pulitzer-Prize-winning memoir.
Opening Friday, the feature and book deal with the sorrowful and impoverished 1930s Irish existence of McCourt's family during his formative years.
Filmed mostly in Dublin and McCourt's home town of Limerick, Watson was both Parker's and McCourt's first choice to profile McCourt's mom. (Robert Carlyle plays McCourt's father, while three Irish kids -- Joe Breen, Ciaran Owens and Michael Legge -- play McCourt at different times in his adolescent life.)
The role for Watson seems just about right for her -- she steals scenes, as usual.
"I've been a very lucky girl," says the Londoner and Royal Shakespeare Company graduate, looking weary but spunky.
Fortunate or not, Watson's rise has been remarkable. Her roles as a depressed Scottish wife in her film debut, Breaking The Waves, was worthy of an Oscar nom a few years ago. So was her portrayal last year of a terminally ill cellist in Hilary And Jackie.
By all estimations, Watson is a favourite to get another nomination for her work in Angela's Ashes.
The only thing more consistent than her acclaim was defining the depressed and downtrodden.
Watson grins sheepishly, then interrupts the continuation of her career assessment with a bashfully quiet interjection.
"Hah-ha," she says playfully. "I've done Trixie, which is a screwball-comedy kind of thing, where I'm several sandwiches short of a picnic."
And that's not all, she's quick to point out, pretending to be offended by the generalization of her role choices.
"I'm doing Luzhin Defense, which is an adaptation of a Nabakov novel. I'm playing Natanya, who is a very healthy, cheerful, happy, young lady who falls in love with a mad, genius chess player."
So much for the Watson downer business.
"There are lots of things you might know," she says, teasing.
Like a decade ago, Watson was turned down at the London Drama School, not once but twice.
"Twice, yes," she says smiling. "Well, I was probably very bad.
"I was sort of 20 or something, and I was just sort of odd-jobbing in London and doing bits and pieces and thought, 'Well, I might as well try again.' At that age you don't think, 'I have to decide the rest of my life.' "
Luckily for Watson and many of her fans, she ignored the photocopied drama-school rejection note, and pursued an acting career anyway.
She was as shocked as most of her buddies when she landed a spot at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Within months, she stunned many again when she became a featured player.
Five years later, Watson is praised by colleagues and pursued by directors.
Fame, so far, has not suffocated her.
"I'm not like a face that people know," she stresses. "They go, 'Are you my bank manager?' "
Even after the incredibly overwhelming Oscar exposure, Watson seems to move about the masses, and still keep her perspective on what her movie fame all means.
"Yes," Watson says, "I do keep things in perspective, don't I?
"But I must say I was less kind of overwhelmed the second time at the Oscars. I was less naive, too. You kind of understand it's a bit more of a marketplace than a fairytale.
"I mean, it is a fantastic honour to be there," she adds diplomatically. "And to be in that position and to meet all those people, really."
What Watson isn't saying is 'meat-market exploitation' but we know how it works, and Watson doesn't want to say something that will come back to haunt her, jeopardize her career.
As, if. Especially after Angela's Ashes, in which Watson offers a detailed yet subtle performance of a mother and wife valiantly trying to maintain her sanity while holding together her family.
It's an amazingly complete picture of poverty she provides, and this from a middle-class North Londoner who grew up healthy, happy and hardly ever depressed.
It was the magic of movies, she says.
"Yeah," she says, "the make-up woman had a box which was labeled 'standard grime.'
"Every morning, we'd all line up and she'd be there with a sponge. All the boys knees would get scabs, and dirt, and stuff on their elbows.
"She'd say to me, 'Your hair looks too clean, let's have some grease in it.'"
The glamorous life.
"Yeah," she says smiling, "the dirty make-up was very glamorous."
The ANGELA'S ASHES File
Emily Watson suggests why McCourt's memoir became so popular:
"Anyone could kind of dream up a kind of mulchy story about poor children leaving and finding salvation in America. But this is actually somebody's true story, and it has great authority because of that.
"It's actually somebody who has spent his life serving the New York community as a school teacher, retired, and sat down and wrote his life story. That's something very special, isn't it?"
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