Elementary Watson

THERE'S really no getting away from it. Emily Watson is a thoroughly nice English middle-class girl. Which implies drab and safe. Rows of red-tiled semi-detached suburban houses with a washed car in the driveway and lace curtains neatly-drawn inside double- glazed windows. Quietly getting on with life without disturbing the neighbours.

"Mmmmm, I know," she exclaims, like Sybil in Fawlty Towers.

So she encourages the label. That way nobody thinks of relating her outrageous behaviour before the cameras to her actual life. "It's my way of protecting myself," she tells me. "Everyone wants me to be a fruitcake. Sorry to disappoint you." Now 33, she's taller (5ft 8in) and slimmer ("Jackie had big breasts and I had to wear a Wonderbra for the film") than you expect. But she sits there demurely, chatting happily over afternoon tea. Can this really be the woman in Breaking the Waves - the controversial 1996 Lars Von Trier love story that won her her first Oscar nomination - who when her oil rigger husband gets paralysed, slept around like a whore and reported back so that he could experience sex vicariously through her experiences. That's all just acting. Well, isn't it? "I think it's really about inhabiting an imaginative world," she says. "You do your research and find out things. But...", she gestures to her body, "it really goes on in here. It does surprise me, really, where some of the things I do come from. "The characters that I play, you kind of look over your shoulder" - she gives a little gasp - "and you think, where did that come from? Because you know they are not things that have happened to you in your life. At all. I get slightly worried occasionally." She should worry. Ask the appreciative Academy Award voters, who have nominated her as Best Actress for Hilary and Jackie. Again - as with Breaking The Waves - it's for carrying on in a way that would hardly go down well in Maidenhead. As the doomed cellist Jacqueline Du Pre she has an affair with her brother-in-law to help her through a nervous breakdown - all with her sister's meek compliance. Not surprisingly, Hilary and Jackie, based on the recollections of Jackie Du Pre's sister Hilary and brother Piers, has provoked outrage - although the public are rushing out to buy up CDs of Jackie Du Pre playing Elgar's Cello Concerto, a piece she made her own. A CHILD prodigy who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when she was 23 and died 14 years later in 1987, Du Pre is an icon to classical musicians. Cellist Julian Lloyd-Webber has objected that Watson portrays her as "a spoilt, selfish harridan who monopolises her parents' attention". Watson shrugs. "I don't see the film he saw," she says. "He met her when she was five years into her illness. I don't think he really came to know her better than her sister. The film is very clearly about subjective points of view. The film is saying that everybody's memory of the same event is different." There's a sense in which the punishing, incestuous life of the international music circuit - where she glittered so fitfully - destroyed her. "I think that was half Jackie's trouble, that isolated superstar status," says Watson. "She'd lost touch with something that was very real in her life that she wanted. "I think she'd probably wanted kids and a home life and all that. She dwelt in this very extreme world of artistry. It's great for the rest of us, because she was so brilliant. But it cost her, and it cost the people around her." Watson didn't meet Hilary Du Pre until after she had completed the movie. "How would I describe her? She's a wonderfully eccentric Englishwoman. She has very clear blue eyes. She's never worn make-up in her life. "A lot of people are saying, 'Oh, she should never have told her story, she should have kept it to herself.' But when you meet her, her sense of love for Jackie is so strong. I trust that." Watson didn't feel inhibited by the aura that surrounded Du Pre. "You have to do your homework. I read everything about her. I studied all the videos, I learned the cello. But at the end of the day you draw the line and say I've got to make this my own and not be limited by the fact that she was a real person. "And the director Anand Tucker was so in love with the material that I couldn't help but throw myself aboard - or throw myself overboard! - and just go for it." It helped that Watson has a big sister of her own. "Harriet is married with a kid and lives in the States. I hasten to add that our relationship is far less complex that theirs was. "But it's true that you're close to your sister in a way that you're not close to anyone else. You don't have to tell her things, but that she understands in a way other people never will." The Watsons grew up in London. Their father is an architect, their mother an English teacher. "We went to theatre a lot. We didn't have a telly, which I think is a very good thing to do to children. It makes you more hungry. Television is very easy. You just sit there and stare at it. It requires less active imagination than reading a book." Watson failed her first two auditions for drama school. Her early work was in fringe theatre and pubs. She met her actor husband Jack Waters at the RSC while they were appearing in The Taming of the Shrew. "We were both nobodies in the back row." She learned music at school. "I played the cello for about six months when I was 14, not very well at all. I knew how to hold the thing, but I had to do a lot of study before Hilary and Jackie, getting the fingering, learning the bowing and working with a movement teacher to get the fluency - because Jackie was an electrifying, mesmeric, hypnotic, dancing performer." She even took the cello with her to Dublin when she was playing the role of Daniel Day-Lewis's childhood sweetheart in Jim Sheridan's The Boxer. "It sat staring at me from the corner of my room in The Clarence. I think I got it out, like twice. You can't really get focussed on two films at once." The Boxer was the first film in which she worked in a regular studio set-up. She even had her own trailer. Emily keeps getting cast as a woman at odds with social convention, although Tim Robbins' The Cradle Will Rock, which was shot in New York last summer, may change that ("It's about Orson Welles' theatre company in the 1930s and various comical and astonishing events surrounding that"). Her only proper middle class role was as Christian Bale's suburban wife in an adaptation of Julian Barnes' satirical novel Metroland. She'll next be seen as the long-suffering mother in Alan Parker's version of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. "It's a kind of depressing part to play but the child actors make it all worth it. They're just staggering." Acting in a sense means becoming the opposite to what you are, which she first realised in her debut movie Breaking the Waves when she had to imagine herself as an impressionable girl growing up under the puritanical intolerance of the Wee Frees in the Scottish Western Isles. HELENA Bonham-Carter was originally supposed to play the role, but apparently dropped out over the sexual frankness demanded by Lars Van Trier, the Danish director whose recent The Idiots is still awaiting clearance from British censors, troubled by its explicit depiction of the act of intercourse. "It was a great experience for me", says Emily. "We have an expression in our household, BBW and ABW - Before Breaking the Waves and After Breaking the Waves. "I'd not made a movie before. What I was doing was working blind. "What I loved about it was that the actual film is very structured, rather like a fairy story. But it's actually shot like a home video, completely anarchic chaos. I loved that."

Copyright 1999
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