NEW YORK -- There is something about Emily Watson that makes directors cast her in harrowing roles.
"I dunno what it is," says Watson, blinking soulful, grey-blue eyes. "I suppose once you've done it once, then you're kind of on the list, aren't you?
"But it's also that the (harrowing roles) are always great stories. They're more dramatic. And they're a lot of fun, as an actor, to do," explains the soft-spoken Watson, today wearing dark slacks and a short black leather jacket over a pink sweater.
Judging from her recent pictures, if playing women in dire straits is fun, Watson must be having a ball.
Making her film debut in 1996's Breaking the Waves, she was cast as Bess - an innocent Scottish bride who's fanatical devotion to her suddenly disabled husband embraces degradation and prostitution. Her portrayal - critics called it mesmerizing - earned Watson an Oscar nomination for best actress.
Next she played Daniel Day-Lewis's long-suffering wife in The Boxer, again to critical acclaim.
Her heart-wrenching performance in Hilary and Jackie won her another best-actress nomination nod from the Academy.
Three harrowing roles; three Oscar-worthy performances. In Angela's Ashes, which opened yesterday, Watson delivers a poignantly restrained performance that's sure to catch the attention of the Academy again.
The demure British actress polished her craft at the Drama Studio in west London before acting in regional theatre and then the Royal Shakespeare Company.
At the Royal National Theatre, she played the malevolent Mary in Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour. Her acting so realistic; she drew boos at curtain call from the audience, still upset at her evil character.
"I really enjoyed (the boos), actually," she once confessed to an interviewer.
After Breaking the Waves, The Boxer and Hillary and Jackie, Watson - not wanting to become the "queen of tragedy" - had been on the lookout for lighter material.
She obviously didn't find it with Angela's Ashes. The critically acclaimed best-seller from Irish-American writer Frank McCourt recounts his struggles as a boy growing up in poverty in Ireland.
"When the script arrived I thought, 'Oh, no, not another harrowing woman's part.' But I read it and the story was so uplifting, so full of love ... And you don't turn down the opportunity to work with (director) Alan Parker."
Watson plays McCourt's mom, an impoverished woman who loses three of her children to disease.
Raised in middle-class England, Watson had little in her upbringing to draw upon for the role. In the film, for instance, the family often goes hungry.
"One of the things Frank McCourt told me, was that he couldn't get over, that in America, children would refuse bread because it wasn't the sort they would eat."
Physically unlike McCourt's mom, "she was a big woman," the tall but rather waifish Watson created an Angela in her own image.
"This is somebody that everyone who has read the book will have a different image in their imagination of who Angela was. And you can't compete with that. You can't go out and try and embody everyone's version of it.
"So I have to put all of that aside and build my own thing. And really, (the role) was about the children. All I would have to do each day was respond to the children and the things that happened to them. And that's what Angela is about."
Working with the children in the cast, especially the toddlers, wasn't easy. Recounts director Parker: "Watching (Watson and co-star Robert Carlyle) coping with the flailing arms and wriggling bodies, patiently waiting for the screaming to stop in between takes and still managing to get their own lines out deserved all of our admiration."
Watson says: "You know I really think Angela had a nervous breakdown, at the beginning of the story, when she is losing her first child. There was no funeral, no burial. The body just kind of disappeared. Her head went under water at that point, for the rest of her life."
So much for lighter material.
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