LADY OF SORROWS

Spotlight

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Everyone expects me to be such a nutter," Emily Watson says merrily. "But I'm really O.K." Hardly what you'd expect from her screen roles. In Lars von Trier's 1996 Breaking the Waves, Watson played a saintly obsessive who prostitutes herself at the insistence of her paralyzed husband. Her harrowing film debut earned an Academy Award nomination, which she promptly followed with another for her devastating portrayal of cellist Jacqueline du Pre's tragic battle with multiple sclerosis in Hilary and Jackie. And now the Oscar buzz has begun again for Angela's Ashes, based on Frank McCourt's "epic of woe" about his miserable Irish Catholic childhood. Watson stars as the author's mother, who bears seven children and loses three to poverty and illness, begging in order to support her family. "Her life is pretty grim," admits Watson, who actually cames from a nice middle-class English background and is married to actor Jack Waters. "Really being absolutely taxed and stretched is a fantastic feeling as an actress—but also exhausting." Tim Robbins's upcoming Cradle Will Rock brings yet another character in extremis, a homeless street waif. Watson, who turns 33 in January, is now filming Nabokov's The Luzhin Defense. More Sturm und Drang? "I have an aptitude for going down a certain path if I want," acknowledges Watson, who credits her first director. "Lars drew something out of me that I didn't know was there. It just opened your heart and mind to the possibilities of extreme emotion—and once you've done it, you know how to open those doors again. I have a very vivid imagination." And whatever the occupational hazards of portraying desperate characters, she adds, "Waitressing was a lot worse."

LESLIE BENNETTS