Naomi Ellen Watts (born 28 September 1968) is a British actress. Known for her work predominantly in independent films, she has received various accolades, including an Actor Award, a Critics' Choice Award and two Saturn Awards as well as nominations for two Academy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, and two Golden Globe Awards.
After her family moved to Australia, Watts made her film debut there in the drama For Love Alone (1986). She appeared in three television series, Hey Dad..! (1990), Brides of Christ (1991), and Home and Away (1991), and the film Flirting (1991). Ten years later, Watts moved to the United States, where she initially struggled as an actress. After appearing in a number of small-scale productions, she received the breakthrough role of an aspiring actress in David Lynch's mystery film Mulholland Drive (2001), which brought her to international attention.
Watts played a tormented journalist in the horror remake The Ring (2002). For playing a grief-stricken mother in Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams (2003) and Maria Bennett in the disaster film The Impossible (2012), she received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Watts' other film credits include starring roles in I Heart Huckabees (2004), King Kong (2005), Eastern Promises (2007), The International (2009), Birdman (2014), St. Vincent (2014), While We're Young (2015), The Glass Castle (2017), and Luce (2019). She also appeared in the Divergent franchise (2015–2016).
Watts ventured into television with the third season of Lynch's mystery series Twin Peaks (2017) and the biographical miniseries The Loudest Voice (2019). She then starred in the Netflix thriller series The Watcher (2022), the FX anthology series Feud: Capote vs. The Swans (2024) and the Hulu legal drama series All's Fair (2025–present). For her portrayal of Babe Paley in Feud, she received a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie.
Her advocacy includes ambassadorships in the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS and Pantene's Beautiful Lengths. Separated from actor Liev Schreiber, with whom she shares two children, Watts married actor Billy Crudup in 2023.
Early life and education
Naomi Ellen Watts was born on 28 September 1968, in Shoreham, Kent, England. She is the daughter of Myfanwy (Miv) Edwards (née Roberts), an antiques dealer and costume and set designer, and Peter Watts (1946–1976), a road manager and audio engineer who worked with Pink Floyd. Watts's maternal grandfather was Welsh. Watts's parents divorced when she was four years old. After the divorce, their mother moved several times with Watts and her older brother Ben within South East England. Their father Peter Watts left Pink Floyd in 1974 and remarried in 1976. In August 1976, when Naomi Watts was nearly eight years old, he was found dead in a flat in Notting Hill, London, of an apparent heroin overdose. Following his death, Watts's mother moved the family to Llanfawr Farm in Llangefni and Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, towns on the island of Anglesey in North Wales, to live with her parents, Nikki and Hugh Roberts. During this period of three years, Watts attended a Welsh medium school, Ysgol Gyfun Llangefni.
She later said of her time in Wales: "We took Welsh lessons in a school in the middle of nowhere while everyone else was taking English. Wherever we moved, I would adapt and pick up the regional accent. It's obviously significant now, me being an actress. Anyway, there was quite a lot of sadness in my childhood, but no lack of love." In 1978, her mother remarried and moved with her children to Suffolk. (She and her second husband later divorced.) There Watts attended Thomas Mills High School. Watts has said that she wanted to become an actress after seeing her mother performing on stage and from the time she watched the 1980 film Fame. In 1982, when Watts was 14, the family moved to Sydney, Australia. Her mother Myfanwy established a career in the burgeoning film business, first working as a stylist for television commercials. She turned to costume design, and worked for the soap opera Return to Eden. Watts briefly cameoed as a model in two episodes. Watts was enrolled by her mother in acting lessons in Sydney. She auditioned for numerous television advertisements, where she met and befriended the actress Nicole Kidman. In Australia, Watts attended Mosman High School and North Sydney Girls High School. She did not graduate from school. After leaving school she worked as a papergirl, a negative cutter, and managed a "deli" (corner store) in Sydney's affluent North Shore.
At the age of 18, Watts decided to become a model. She signed with a models agency that sent her to Japan, but after several failed auditions, she returned to Sydney. She began to work in advertising for a department store. Follow Me magazine hired her as an assistant fashion editor. A casual invitation to participate in a drama workshop inspired Watts to quit her job and pursue acting. Despite her years in Australia, Watts considers herself firmly British in regards to her nationality. She has said that: "I consider myself British and have very happy memories of the UK. I spent the first 14 years of my life in England and Wales and never wanted to leave. When I was in Australia I went back to England a lot."
Career
Early roles and struggling career (1986–2000)
Watts's career began in television, where she made brief appearances in commercials. She made her film debut in For Love Alone (1986). It was set in the 1930s and based on Christina Stead's 1945 best-selling novel of the same name. In 1990 she appeared in two episodes of the fourth season of the Australian sitcom Hey Dad..!. At the 1989 premiere of her friend Nicole Kidman's film Dead Calm, Watts met John Duigan, who invited her to take a supporting role in his 1991 indie film Flirting. The film received critical acclaim and was featured on American critic Roger Ebert's list of the 10 best films of 1992. Also in 1991, she took the part of Frances Heffernan, a girl who struggles to find friends at a Catholic school in Sydney, in the mini-series Brides of Christ. She also had a recurring role in the soap opera Home and Away as the handicapped Julie Gibson. Watts was offered a role in the drama series A Country Practice but turned it down, not wanting to "get stuck on a soap for two or three years". She later said that decision was "naïve".
Watts took a year off to travel, visiting Los Angeles and being introduced to agents through Kidman. Encouraged, Watts decided to move to the United States, to pursue her career further. In 1993, she had a small role in the John Goodman film Matinee. She returned to Australia temporarily to star in three Australian films: another of Duigan's pictures, Wide Sargasso Sea; and the drama The Custodian. She had her first leading role in the film Gross Misconduct, as a student who accuses one of her teachers (played by Jimmy Smits) of raping her. Watts returned to Los Angeles and the US for good but had difficulty finding agents, producers and directors willing to hire her. She never worked outside the film industry, but had some tight times in which she was unable to pay the rent on time and lost her medical insurance.
At first, everything was fantastic and doors were opened to me. But some people who I met through Nicole [Kidman], who had been all over me, had difficulty remembering my name when we next met. There were a lot of promises, but nothing actually came off. I ran out of money and became quite lonely, but Nic gave me company and encouragement to carry on.
When I came to America there was so much promise of good stuff and I thought, I've got it made here. I'm going to kick ass. Then I went back to Australia and did one or two more jobs. When I returned to Hollywood, all those people who'd been so encouraging before weren't interested. You take all their flattery seriously when…