Star Wattage

There is something chameleon-like about Naomi Watts. Although she was nominated for an Oscar for her soulscraping performance in

Until recently, 35-year-old Watts's most famous role was that of Nicole Kidman's best friend. She's seen her go from red carpet to heartbreak and back again, and remained snugly in her shadow. Now, it seems that the two friends, who met on a casting couch for a bikini ad when they were 16, and subsequently starred together in the 1991 film, Flirting, may be jostling for position on the top of the A-list. Watts's performance in 21 Grams, directed by acclaimed Amores Perros director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and co-starring Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro, is the kind she looks like she's been storing up her whole life to give. She plays a recovering addict, a mother who loses both her husband and children in a road accident, and the film sees her in a constant state of trauma.

Watts signed up for 21 Grams sight unseen, just to work with Inarritu, and not knowing that Sean Penn was to be her onscreen lover. For research purposes, she sat in group therapy meetings with parents who'd lost children. 'I felt that way, I would come a little closer to my portrayal, but that pain remains unimaginable. I like the way Inarritu dealt with pain and turned it into a redemptive force. It's a powerful thing because it makes you know who you are and know that you're alive because you're feeling. So you know it doesn't have to be so horrible.'

At an age when many Hollywood actresses would be panicking about their shelf life, Watts has become hot property to directors. But the heat that now surrounds her name has been a long time coming. After 10 years watching Kidman's fame grow while she grafted away with small parts, her breakthrough role came in 2001, with David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. On the way up, she once worked with Tom Cruise in a commercial for lamb. She played a girl who won a date in a radio competition and the date was Cruise. 'The date was on a Sunday.

I said, "Sorry, I can't come. My mum's cooking a lamb roast." Quite funny as my best friend later married him.'

Did she ever feel daunted watching how Nicole dealt with her fame and the traumas of her private life? 'She has never been consumed by fame,' says Watts. 'I've watched her deal with things in incredible ways. It's always been a twin goal of mine that I could be successful and at the same time maintain anonymity. I don't want to be someone who's watched by everyone. I want to be the observer still. Acting is about being a blank canvas. And celebrity takes that power away. I've certainly never been jealous of Nicole.'

She says, though it can't have been easy at the time, that she's glad the breaks didn't come to her earlier. 'I just don't know that I could have handled it as well as Nic. Everyone has their path, and it wasn't my path,' she says, suddenly sounding very LA, although she's not a big fan of the place, preferring to live in New York, where she's recently moved.

Watts is used to a peripatetic lifestyle. She was born in Kent, and later moved to Wales. Her mother, Myfannwy, is Welsh, and had Watts and her older brother Ben in her early twenties. Their father was a sound engineer for Pink Floyd, known to the world as that eerie laughing voice that appears on The Dark Side Of The Moon. They broke up when she was four and he died a few years later. The family moved first to Wales, then, when Naomi was 14, to Australia, where she took acting classes. By coincidence (or perhaps the significance is intentional), she carries a Pink Floyd lighter.

'I grew up for the first 14 years of my life, every year in a different school, always the new girl, always feeling I've got to find a way to fit in, never being in the centre of it,' she recalls. 'So I'm used to adapting, both as a person and an actor.'

Last year she met, bonded, fell in love with, broke up with and then got back together again with the Australian actor Heath Ledger. He is 11 years her junior but, she says, 'It's the soul you fall in love with and souls have no age.' It wasn't an instant thing, though - nothing that flippant. In fact, she says with passion, 'I hate that. I'm very suspicious of people I think I know. I don't trust it. I like the discovery.

I like the mystery.'

Just to prove that she can be a fabulously late bloomer in Hollywood, Watts has taken on a slew of roles this year. First up, there is a movie called Stay with Ewan McGregor, then there's The Assassination Of Richard Nixon, with Sean Penn again, the sequel to the 2002 horror hit, The Ring, and the remake of King Kong.