NEW YORK -- Like her Angela's Ashes co-star Robert Carlyle, Emily Watson can be seen in two different movies currently in theatres.
In Angela's Ashes, she plays Frank McCourt's tragedy-prone mother, who must endure not only the ignominies of poverty but also the deaths of three of her children.
Across the cineplex in Tim Robbins' new film The Cradle Will Rock (see review on page 25), she's not much better off. In the role of Olive Stanton, she's a homeless, unemployed woman whom we first encounter being kicked out of the theatre where she sleeps and walking to a fire hydrant where she must, as discreetly as possible, attempt to take a bath on the streets of Depression-era New York.
Or, hey, perhaps you remember Watson from her last Oscar-nominated role, as the dying cellist Jacqueline du Pre in the film Hilary and Jackie?
The question arises: What makes filmmakers think of Watson when they're looking to cast the role of a woman in dire straits?
"I suppose once you've done it once, you're kind of on the list, aren't you?" Watson says simply.
Yes, especially when you do it very well, as Watson did with her debut film performance as the conflicted Scottish wife of a paralysed, sexually incapacitated oil rigger in Lars Von Triers' 1996 film Breaking the Waves. It was a role that promptly won Watson her first Oscar nomination. (Last year's nomination for Hilary and Jackie was her second.)
Director Alan Parker had no trouble making the 32-year-old Londoner his first choice to play the part of Angela McCourt, though she bears little resemblance to the real-life Angela.
"I'm physically quite unlike her. She was a big woman," says Watson, adding that the role was an additional challenge because of the huge popularity of the book on which it is based.
"Everyone in this room will have a different opinion in their imagination of who Angela was," she says. "And there's 10 million people worldwide who have read the book, and you can't repeat that, you can't go out and try and embody everybody's version of it, so I just feel you have to put all that aside."
Like Carlyle, Watson met the author on the set of the film.
"When I asked him if he wanted to tell me anything, he said, 'No,'" she recalls. "And I just felt respect for that really. I just felt he had a complicated relationship with her."
Though the book has elevated McCourt's story to an almost mythic level of suffering, Watson says she nevertheless tried to stay grounded in the role.
"They are true images from Frank McCourt's life story and as an actor, you just respond to those and you just try and fulfil them," she says, adding that the same philosophy applies in Robbins' film. "You just go and you wash yourself in the fire hydrant. You don't play the enormity of the moment. You just play the moment.
"And really, it was all about the children," she says. "All I had to do was respond to those children and the things that happened to them."
Next up for Watson, finally, is a comedy.
In Alan Rudolph's upcoming Trixie, Watson plays the titular heroine, "about a girl who wants to be a private detective and she's got a few links missing," she says.
"I had such fun doing that," she says.
Indeed, you can almost see the relief on her face.
"It wasn't a romantic comedy, where I'm playing the girl. I've yet to find the pair of shoes that fit on that front," she says. "But at least it was a comedy."
More Artists
