Naomi Watts

About Naomi Watts

Naomi Ellen Watts (born 28 September 1968) is a British actress. After her family moved to Australia, she made her film debut there in the drama For Love Alone (1986) and then appeared in three television series, Hey Dad..! (1990), Brides of Christ (1991), and Home and Away (1991), and the film Flirting (1991). After moving to the United States, Watts initially struggled as an actress, taking roles in small-scale films until she starred in David Lynch's psychological thriller Mulholland Drive in 2001 as an aspiring actress. This role started her rise to international prominence.

Watts then played a tormented journalist in the horror remake The Ring (2002). She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as a grief-stricken mother in Alejandro González Iñárritu's film 21 Grams (2003). Her profile continued to grow with starring roles in I Heart Huckabees (2004), King Kong (2005), Eastern Promises (2007), and The International (2009).

For her role as Maria Bennett in the disaster film The Impossible (2012), Watts received another Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. In the 2010s, she starred in such films as Birdman (2014), St. Vincent (2014), While We're Young (2015), The Glass Castle (2017), and Luce (2019). Watts also continued to act in blockbusters, with appearances in the Divergent franchise (2015–2016), and she ventured into television with the Showtime mystery drama series Twin Peaks (2017) and the biographical limited series The Loudest Voice (2019).

Watts is particularly known for her work in remakes and independent productions with dark or tragic themes, as well as portrayals of characters that endure loss or suffering. Magazines such as People and Maxim have included her on their lists of the world's most beautiful women. She has been an ambassador for the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS and Pantene's Beautiful Lengths.

Despite significant media attention, Watts is reticent about her personal life. In 2005, she began a relationship with American actor Liev Schreiber. Their son Sasha was born in 2007, and their daughter Kai, who was assigned male at birth, was born in 2008. On 26 September 2016, Watts and Schreiber announced their split after 11 years together. She began dating actor Billy Crudup in 2017, after they met on the set of the Netflix drama series Gypsy. The couple married on June 9, 2023.