The Herald:

 

By James Mottram

Emily Watson is feeling delicate. “Ever so slightly the worse for wear” as she terms it, in a soft, mellifluous voice befitting someone who once described herself as “a nice middle-class English girl”.

Settling herself down in a small air-conditioned hotel room, it’s the morning after the night before, when Watson’s movie, Everest, opened the Venice Film Festival. Today, the 48-year-old actor is feeling it. “Everything was so late,” she says. “We didn’t sit down to dinner until about 11.”

Admittedly, Watson’s idea of “worse for wear” is not to steam in, reeking of booze and reaching for the coffee. Sipping on a fruit tea, her blue eyes – her most distinctive feature, along with that slightly upturned nose – are bright not blurred. Wearing large gold-hooped earrings and a long-sleeved dress, a swirl of peach, brown and white colours and patterns, Watson is not about to suggest a day of press is taxing. “You turn up, dress up, somebody does your makeup, you come in, talk and hope not to make an idiot of yourself.”

She has been doing it for 20 years, since Lars von Trier plucked her out of virtual obscurity for Breaking the Waves, in which she played Bess McNeil, a devoutly religious girl from the Highlands whose paralysed atheist husband encourages her to bed other men. After the film played at the Edinburgh Film Festival, she became one of the first recipients of the Herald Angel award – her first statuette. Golden Globe, BAFTA and Oscar nominations followed.

Two years later, after working with Daniel Day-Lewis in The Boxer, she repeated this triple-whammy for Hilary and Jackie, in which she was marvellous as Jacqueline du Pre, the acclaimed cellist whose career was cut short by multiple sclerosis. All of a sudden, this shy, retiring girl from London was a star. “The whole celebrity thing happened to me in a pretty dramatic and fast way,” she says, “and I was … I went a bit catatonic for a while.”

If Watson ever had any meltdowns, she kept them all under wraps, publicly at least, until she got a handle on being recognised. “I remember reading a great quote from Helen Hunt, who said: ‘You read all this great stuff about yourself in the magazines and then get absolutely vilified for believing it,’” she says.

Watson dislikes how mass exposure can warp a person. “The thing I don’t like about it is the sense of entitlement that people get: you’re doing something special … No, you’re an actor. Another great quote from another great actor – Emma Thompson – said: ‘Fame is like somebody is carrying a radio down the street. You hear it in the distance and then it gets really loud and then they walk on, and it gets quieter and quieter, and goes away, and you don’t notice it after a while.’”

Watson has had way more than her 15 minutes, mind. In the early 2000s, Hollywood took notice. She appeared in the Hannibal Lecter tale Red Dragon, and in Paul Thomas Anderson’s dreamily romantic Punch-Drunk Love. Along the way, there have been films for celebrated directors including Steven Spielberg (War Horse), though Watson is well aware of how the industry perceives her.

“I don’t ever do glamorous roles,” she says. “You get over the hump when you’re not ‘the girl’ any more and then it’s a bit dodgy for a while, and then it starts getting really interesting.”

She is, of course, frequently cast as the mother now – recently, mother to First World War chronicler Vera Brittain in Testament of Youth and the Queen Mother herself in A Royal Night Out, the charmingly silly fantasy about the young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, out on the town on VE Night. But if these were rather thankless, Watson hasn’t seen her career simply drift into the arena of costume-drama caricatures.

She won a BAFTA for her work in 2012’s Appropriate Adult, playing the social worker assigned to killer Fred West, and don’t be surprised if she doesn’t claim another for her work in this year’s A Song for Jenny, playing another real-life matriarch, Julie Nicholson, whose daughter Jenny was killed in the 7/7 terror attacks in London. “She was an incredibly brave person, but it was so emotionally extreme,” Watson reflects. “I found myself feeling quite unbalanced by that.”

It prompts an interesting discussion about the emotional wear-and-tear acting takes. “You’re faking it but you’re going down neural pathways that are as real as somebody who is having the experience. You can properly traumatise yourself. I have done that once or twice myself and ended up in a bit of a state.”

How does she deal with this? “You learn to do the things that are going to ground you, and let it go.” She goes walking and likes to paint, “creative, soothing, therapeutic stuff”. Of course, it helps that she has a family – a husband, two children and a dog – to snap her round. “Sometimes I don’t notice that it happened so I have people going, ‘Come back! Where have you gone?’”

Emotion is very much on the agenda in Watson’s latest role, in Everest. Like A Song for Jenny, it’s another tale of real-life tragedy, telling of the moment when eight climbers died on Mt Everest in May 1996 during an attempt to scale the summit. A huge ensemble, led by Jason Clarke as Kiwi mountaineer Rob Hall, the leader of the fatal expedition, with Josh Brolin, Jake Gyllenhaal and John Hawkes also in the cast, it’s a spectacular film – a vertigo-inducing recreation of what it’s like to climb the world’s highest mountain.

Watson plays Helen Wilton, the New Zealand base camp manager left helpless when she realises Hall and the others are stuck on the mountain with a violent storm heading in.

It is she who, quite literally, connects the stranded Rob, via a satellite phone and a walkie-talkie, to his pregnant wife Jan (played by Keira Knightley), equally helpless back home in Christchurch. Her real-life counterpart tells me she was “very glad” Watson got to play her. So what did the actor get right? “The emotion,” says Wilton, bluntly. “She looked stricken.”

The film’s director, Baltasar Kormakur, pays tribute, calling Watson “wonderful” and “trustworthy”, before comparing her to Wilton. “She has very similar elements to the real character,” he says, pointing out that Wilton has “a motherly, protective nature but she’s not without a sting”. For him, Watson was the perfect choice. “She crushed me in [Breaking the Waves], and she hasn’t always been given the opportunities she deserves. I think she is one of the finest actresses in the world.”

Watson first met the Christchurch-based Wilton over Skype, to get to know her. There was practical work to do – perfecting Wilton’s Kiwi accent (not so daunting, as Watson has spent time in New Zealand, and has friends there) and listening to the recordings of the actual conversations between Hall and Wilton.

“Devastating to listen to … just to hear the change in centre of gravity in somebody, as the situation escalates. You can hear it in their voices.”

Watson shot her sequences in studios in Rome and London, which rather suited her, given her children – Juliet, nine, and Dylan, six – are at an age when they need their mother. Her maternal instincts are the reason you won’t find her climbing Everest, she says. “I have responsibilities which I intend to fulfil to the best of my abilities, and I wouldn’t wantonly put myself in harm’s way,” she says. “I wouldn’t deliberately choose to put myself at that much risk because I have children.”

So she’s not an adrenalin junkie? “I’m really a wimp.” Then she smiles for a second. “I did go tree surfing in Devon – it sounds really pathetic!” Said activity is the art of going up into the treetops and “surfing” from trunk to trunk via walkways and zip-wires. “There was one thing called a leap of faith. It’s a 50-foot platform and you’re on a harness, and you just jump. I had to do it because my kids did it. And that was my Room 101!

But I did do it.” And afterwards? “I felt good,” she says. “I was crying and laughing and shaking.”

It wasn’t her only high this year. She recently won an OBE, presented to her at Buckingham Palace by Prince Charles. “It was extremely thrilling. There’s a bit when you’re waiting and they play the national anthem and I suddenly felt like I’d won gold in the Olympics 100 metres.” Still, there can’t be many recipients who had just played Charles’ grandmother – as Watson did in A Royal Night Out. “The filmmakers really wanted me to say, ‘Have you seen it?’ or mention it. But I thought, ‘I’m not going to do that! This isn’t about my two minutes in your tiny film.’”

In the end, the conversation was predictably brief. “He said [adopting a reasonable Charles voice], ‘What have you been up to?’ and I said, ‘I’m being Mum at home at the moment.’ And he said, ‘Well, jolly good, they’ve noticed after all this time!’ Which was really sweet. But I bet that’s what he says when he doesn’t really know anything about you.” The children came too. “They loved that. Well, actually, no, they were quite bored, because they had to sit still for two hours. And you weren’t allowed to take anything with you.”

In some ways, it’s been a year of extremes for Watson. Her father, Richard, died a few months back. She lost her mother Katherine in 2010, just as she was flying back from the Australian shoot of Oranges and Sunshine, having learnt that she’d been taken ill suddenly with encephalitis. Watson describes her parents as “lifelong followers of all things spiritual”. When she was young, they sent her to St James Independent School, which was run according to the principles of the Hindu philosophical system Advaita Vedanta (the school was later subjected to allegations of mistreatment of its pupils, something Watson denies she ever saw).

Born in Islington but raised in west London, Watson grew up without a television and became a prolific reader. “I think I wanted to become an actor when I was a child but I never admitted it to anyone, including myself,” she says. Eventually she went on to study English at Bristol University, and joined a drama club. By the end of her three years spent “thinking about theatre and not doing very much work”, she applied to drama school, following most of her friends.

Studying acting at London’s Drama Studio, when she graduated, she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, honing her craft on stage. It was here where she met her husband, actor-turned-playwright Jack Waters; they married in 1995, shortly before Watson’s career took off, and now live in Greenwich, in southeast London. “I do realise how lucky I am to be married to such a sensitive human being,” she says, calling Waters her artistic “touchstone”.

Watson’s domestic life has also shaped her career. Yet she has chosen for it to be this way. “I do American films that happen to shoot in Europe because I’ve got kids,” she says. “It’s a really logistically difficult deal, as they’re in school.”

If America is off the agenda, at least until her children grow up, Watson has hardly been lying dormant. She’s just completed a TV movie of The Dresser, an adaptation of the classic Ronald Harwood play set backstage in a theatre during the Second World War. “[I was] pinching myself every day at work.” Understandable, given this new version is being directed by the acclaimed Richard Eyre and stars the equally feted Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Anthony Hopkins.

“On the first day, Ian McKellen and I, we had a long, 10-page scene. He had so much to get through. It was just a sense of ‘I’m going to f*** this up!’ He was terrified. He was shaking.” A brief look of concern flashes across her face. “I shouldn’t be saying this!” she cries. Fielding personal questions doesn’t come naturally to Watson; she’s just an ordinary person doing an unusual job extraordinarily well. Do her kids think what she does is cool? “[To them] I’m just an annoying mum,” she chuckles, softly. When she returns to them in London, she doesn’t know what’s coming next. “It’s a gypsy life,” she says. But she’s used to that by now. n Everest (12A) opens in cinemas on September 17.