Naomi Ellen Watts is an English-Australian actress. She is known for her roles in Mulholland Drive, the film remakes of The Ring, King Kong and most recently Funny Games, as well as her Academy Award-nominated role in the film 21 Grams.
Watts was born in Shoreham, Kent, England, the daughter of Myfannwy "Miv" Roberts, an antiques dealer and costume and set designer, and Peter Watts, a road manager and sound engineer who worked with Pink Floyd.
Watts' parents separated when she was four years old, and when she was seven, her father died. She then lived with het mother, brother and grandparents in Wales until she was 14. The family moved to Sydney in 1982 where she obtained Australian nationality.
In Sydney, Watts attended several acting schools, including North Sydney Girls High School, where her classmates included Nicole Kidman, with whom she is still close. In 1986 she took a break from acting and went to Japan to work as a model, but it only lasted for four months.
Watts' career began in Australian television, where she appeared in commercials and television melodramas such as Home and Away and Brides of Christ. She was featured in a supporting role in the acclaimed 1991 Australian indie film Flirting, which starred future Hollywood up-and-comers Nicole Kidman and Thandie Newton. As Watts made the transition from Australia to the United States, she landed a supporting role in the cult 1995 film Tank Girl, playing the part of "Jet Girl".
Finding quality roles in the Hollywood system at first proved difficult for Watts. She appeared in the short-lived series Sleepwalkers and numerous B-list productions such as films like Children of the Corn IV. Gradually, Watts garnered supporting roles in films such as Dangerous Beauty.
In 2001, Watts starred in David Lynch's highly acclaimed Mulholland Drive. The film, which premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, won her the National Society of Film Critics Award as Best Actress and the National Board of Review award as Breakthrough Performance of the year.
Watts worked with director/screenwriter Scott Coffey on Lynch's Mulholland Drive, where Watts had her breakout performance. Her next film, the semi-autobiographical Ellie Parker, grew out of the friendship forged between Watts and Coffey. In 2002, she starred in one of the biggest box office hits of that year, the English language remake of the Japanese horror film The Ring. The following year, she starred in the film Ned Kelly opposite Heath Ledger, Orlando Bloom, and Geoffrey Rush; as well as the Merchant-Ivory film Le Divorce with Kate Hudson. Her performance opposite Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro in director Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams earned Watts her first Academy Award nomination as Best Actress.
She produced and starred in the well-received independent film We Don't Live Here Anymore. She reunited with Sean Penn and Don Cheadle in The Assassination of Richard Nixon, teamed up with Jude Law and Dustin Hoffman in David O. Russell's ensemble comedy I ? Huckabees, and starred in the sequel to the Ring, The Ring Two. She then starred in the much-anticipated remake of King Kong (2005).
Watts starred in The Painted Veil with Edward Norton and Liev Schreiber, released in December 2006. She has since finished the films Funny Games (a remake of an Austrian movie) with Tim Roth and Eastern Promises with Viggo Mortensen.
The press has labeled her the "queen of remakes" because she has starred in so many remakes, and she is scheduled to star in the remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963).
In May 2006, Watts was named a special representative to the U.N. program for HIV/AIDS.
Watts previously dated director Daniel Kirby, playwright Jeff Smeenge, director Stephen Hopkins and Heath Ledger, her co-star in the film Ned Kelly. Since spring 2005, Watts has dated actor Liev Schreiber. The couple's son, Alexander Pete, was born on July 26, 2007 in Los Angeles.