Naomi Watts has enough power ...

Naomi Watts had to endure hokey parts and false starts for many years, but now she's at the peak of her profession. Emma Brockes talks to her about breaking Hollywood the hard way. From the time she first learned to talk until the age of 14, when her family emigrated, Naomi Watts was English.

She went to primary school in west London and secondary school in Suffolk, in the east of England, and between those periods there was a Welsh interlude, when her mother moved the family to Anglesey off the north west coast of Wales.

The Welsh thing didn't stick. But shortly after moving to Sydney, Watts, with the social expediency required of all teenage girls, remade herself as an Australian.

It's possible you don't know who she is, which is no comment on her output - she's been prolific in the past five years -_nor on her talent.

The 39-year-old is a subtle enough actor to have brought real weight to The Ring and King Kong, films that might otherwise have drowned character with special effects.

Her relative anonymity has to do with a certain modesty of style, lack of a sensational story surrounding her and (this sounds worse than I mean it to) her generic prettiness.

She was 31 before she became successful, in the lead of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive and, as far as one can tell, it has preserved her from the worst eccentricities of fame.

Maybe that's why she is so convincing in David Cronenberg's recently released film, Eastern Promises. It is set in London, and Watts plays a midwife, Anna, who delivers a Russian teenager's baby and, when the teenager dies, starts investigating her life story.

It leads her to a drugs and people-trafficking branch of the Russian mafia, in the form of Viggo Mortensen and some hammy cohorts, but Watts is spot-on as the doughty nurse in pursuit of her patient's records.

"I spent time at the Whittington Hospital (London) for the role and you see those girls ... they are no-nonsense, they're not getting made up, they're very earthy. Midwifery is quite noble, isn't it? They don't get paid much, so they're not dressing in a fancy way.

"It's a quiet performance I suppose, compared to some of my other stuff," says Watts. "Anna is very brave. Brave or naive, whichever way you want to look at it."

This is something Watts identifies with: the impulsive gesture that has drawn-out consequences. Stories about her often focus on the casual manner in which she left Australia for LA, full of youthful optimism, and then suffered a wilderness period that lasted seven hard years. She looks back on it now with a kind of wonder. "I could never do that now - you get more attached to your things and your people."

By the standards of most professions, of course, 31 isn't particularly old to get one's break; but in acting, especially for women, it is geriatric.

On closer inspection, her optimism wasn't as blithe as it appears. By her mid-20s, Watts had a good profile in Australia thanks to a lead in the award-winning TV mini-series, Brides of Christ (co-starring Russell Crowe), and she had made a feature film, Flirting, with Nicole Kidman, and had starred in Emma-Kate Croghan's Australian independent hit Strange Planet. (She had also done six weeks of filming for the TV soap Home and Away, which she hated. "Reams of dialogue that they pass you the night before, and they're all so good at it. I found it very intimidating.")

The bigger leap of faith had come several years earlier, when she left what looked like a promising career in the fashion industry to become an actor.

Watts had already tried to make it, unsuccessfully, as a model, and at the age of 18, flew to Japan. But she was too short and "didn't have the fashion look", and in any case, found hawking pictures of herself distasteful.

So she returned to Australia, got a job co-ordinating fashion shoots in a department store, and one day attended a weekend acting course. She had no agent, no training, no experience - just a vague sense, after enjoying it immensely, that this was the right thing to do. "I just said 'I can't live this lie."

She smiles at the memory of her own high drama. And so she resigned from her job, and two weeks later won the role in Flirting.

It would have pained her at one stage to admit it, but this was the kind of rash behaviour that her mother indulged in. She and her brother, who is a year older than her, had an unsettled childhood. Their father, who was a sound engineer for Pink Floyd, separated from their mother when Watts was four, and died when she was six. Her mother moved around a lot after that, sometimes to her parents' home in Wales, other times around the country in pursuit of a doomed relationship.

Watts has described her as "passive-aggressive", threatening to put her children into care unless her own parents took them in.

Finally, when Watts was 14, her mother went on holiday to Australia, where her own mother was from, decided it was the land of opportunity, and uprooted her kids once again, this time for good.

"We were really upset about it. Fourteen and 15 is the age when you're establishing your peer group, and the whole idea of going to the other end of the earth ... I was really sad to be leaving."

When she got to Australia, she sulked for six months.

And after that, she says, "I loved it." She often wonders how she would have been different if she had stayed in the UK. "I wonder if I even would've become an actor. I think I would. I always wanted to go to drama school. But there is less competition in Australia. Maybe in London I would've felt defeated."

As it is, her sense of dual nationality has worked to her advantage. "Australians are halfway between Americans and Brits," she says, and she tempers the self-effacement of the one with the self- advancing tendencies of the other.

She sounds Australian, but her brother, weirdly, still sounds British.

"I guess I've got a more sensitive ear than him. Or a lack of identity." She smiles. "Which is what led me here, I suppose."

In July, Watts gave birth to a son, Alexander. Her partner is the actor Liev Schreiber, with whom she appeared this year in the well-received adaptation of Somerset Maugham's novel, The Painted Veil.

They live in New York and Watts' mother is now in Norfolk, England, where she runs two interior design shops.

Having a son has made Watts look on her own childhood with a more forgiving eye, particularly since her job entails a lot of travel; she is likely to visit some aspects of her own background on her young family.

"I'm struggling with that," she says. "But I think as long as you have some sort of structure, particularly when they start school, it'll be OK. Looking back, I feel glad for the excitement and adventure. There must've been something about it that made me go after a creative life, and my brother, too, who is a photographer."

After she made Flirting, Watts took a year out to travel, and she was so encouraged by meetings she had with agents in LA that when she returned to Australia, she packed up and left for good.

"They were all so enthusiastic and positive and I thought, 'Oh great, I'm gonna come here and make it. This is it, this is gonna happen for me!'"

She smiles ruefully. "So I moved to LA, went back to those people and they were like, 'Oh right ... yeah, good luck to you.' Bang. Close the door."

Several times in the next seven years, she was on the point of leaving. But then something always happened. "There were always little bites. Whenever I felt I was at the end of my rope, something would come up. Something bad," - she appeared in, for example, Children of the Corn IV - "but for me it was 'work begets work'; that was my motto."

The turning point in her career was winning the role in Mulholland Drive, although she didn't realise it at the time. She'd been on the point of breakthroughs before - chiefly when she was cast in the film adaptation of the comic-strip Tank Girl, which bombed.

Mulholland Drive was initially conceived of as a TV show, but then was shelved.

"I thought: just my dumb luck, that I'm in the only David Lynch programme that never sees the light of day."

Then 18 months later it was re-edited as a feature film, and its success launched her.

Since then, Watts has got a reputation for making dark movies - either horror, like the Ring, or 21 Grams, for which she was nominated for an Oscar, or the forthcoming Funny Games, a film about a family who get kidnapped by psychopaths.

"Yeah, grimerama," she says. "Why do I keep making these grim movies?"

She has looked around for comedies, she says, but "the female roles in comedies are not that good".

Also, she thinks there is a value to confronting one's fears on screen.

"When anyone asks why do you do all the dark stuff, I have to say that's why: because it's getting rid of demons."