Guts, guilt & the making of Emily Watson
Emily wears dress, Suzannah London. Earrings, Alighieri
She’s searingly honest about the ups and downs of her marriage, the therapy that helped her come to terms with her unconventional upbringing and how she rejected Hollywood as ‘unsafe’. In her most outspoken interview ever, the Oscar-nominated actress opens up to Julia Llewellyn Smith
'I was raised as a guilty soul and I’ve felt guilty ever since,’ says Emily Watson. ‘There’s been a lot of therapy in my life.’ Coming from the fun, totally down-to-earth woman chatting to me on Zoom, it’s a startling comment.
Laughing about subjects such as the dreaded middle-aged moment when you realise you need a chain to keep you from losing your reading glasses, or your teenagers’ mortification at your mere existence, Emily, 54, comes across as a savvy, wise friend.
Yet Emily’s life has been very different from anyone else’s I know. Obviously, she’s well known as one of our most accomplished actresses, with two Oscar nominations to her name – for her film debut Breaking the Waves and Hilary and Jackie in the late 1990s. More recently, she’s starred in numerous hit television shows such as Apple Tree Yard, Chernobyl and Little Women.
Dress, Iris & Ink, from The Outnet. Earrings, Ruby and Jack. Picture Director: Ester Malloy. Stylist: Sorrel Kinder. fashion Assistant: Rosie Watling. Make-up: Liz Martins at Eighteen Management using Sisley Skincare and Cosmetics. Hair: Liz Taw at The Wall Group using john masters organics.
Her achievements come after what she calls a ‘very unusual’ childhood in North London, when her middle-class parents – architect father and teacher mum – became members of the School of Philosophy and Economic Science, which Emily’s described as ‘a quasi-religious organisation/cult’ based on Hindu teachings, where women had to wear long dresses and ‘keep their place’.
The family had no television and, while Emily doesn’t like discussing details about home life, other former members of the organisation – which flourished in the 1960s and 70s – have reported being banned from listening to music composed after the 18th century, plus spending hours meditating and studying Sanskrit.
Emily and her elder sister attended a school run by the organisation, which was accused of assaulting pupils following an investigation in 2005. She’s reluctant to go into details, saying she ‘knew how to stay out of trouble’, but she witnessed ‘incidents of extreme cruelty which have been very scarring for people going forward in their lives.
‘There are some very mysterious contradictions about my childhood,’ says Emily, who’s the mother of Juliet, 15, and Dylan, 12. ‘I ostensibly had a very loving family, but my parents put me into a situation that – with what I know now – I would never put my children into. They thought they were doing their best but there was a very big disconnect between what they thought and the reality.
Dress, Emilia Wickstead, from mytheresa.com. Earrings, By Pariah. Bracelet, Georgina Scott
‘People felt very obedient to the notion of it all, very passionate about the direction everything was going in, so where other people would have gone, “Whoa, that’s not right”, they turned a blind eye,’ she says. ‘It was a new situation, which was making itself up as it went along, so there was no sense of governance – which is really not great. But as a child born into it you don’t know any of that. Forty years later, you go, “Ooh, hang on a minute…”
‘Actually,’ Emily continues, ‘I think I always knew things weren’t right, but the fear of stepping outside the system was very strongly drilled into you. You knew that if you left the organisation you’d be exposing yourself to grave danger. So it was a long process to go, “I’m fine and I’m going to walk away.”’
In the end, the decision was taken out of Emily’s hands when, aged 28, she signed up to Breaking the Waves, the searing and very graphic film about a young woman whose disabled husband forces her to have sex with other men.
Emily after receiving her OBE in 2015, with husband Jack and children Juliet and Dylan
‘When I agreed to do the film, [the organisation] gave me a good boot and told me to go on my undignified way.’ Those exact words? ‘Yes. I didn’t tell anyone at the time; it was painful, but now I think it was a good experience for an actor because we need to let go and be ugly and undignified.’
In the next few years, Emily’s acting career went stellar. She was offered every role going and turned down plenty of prominent parts, including the lead in Elizabeth, which ended up going to Cate Blanchett, and Amélie, which had been specially written for her but eventually was taken by Audrey Tautou. ‘Amélie was at a time in my life when I’d been away a lot; I needed to be at home more, and, anyway, the film was in French, which I don’t speak, and I’d seen Juliette Binoche [speaking English badly] in Wuthering Heights and thought “Hmm, no!”’
Emily with Apple Tree Yard co-star Ben Chaplin,
That Emily has since been able to work so prolifically and raise a family is down to her husband Jack Waters whom she met when they were both acting at the Royal Shakespeare Company. While Emily became a star, he was ‘chewed up and spat out’ by the industry.
‘It’s been really tough because I’ve worked and Jack hasn’t and that’s been really hard on him,’ she says. ‘He’s been very inventive and done an incredible job of keeping the children and everything together when I’m away down a rabbit hole of pretending to be somebody else – but in itself that’s a strain on any relationship. We’re both creative people and you need to exercise that creativity – it’s like a dog needing a walk every day – but when that gets totally squeezed out by the machine of having a family then it becomes quite stressful.’
with Denise Gough in Too Close
The couple, who live in Southeast London, celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary during lockdown last year. How did they make it this far? ‘Well, anybody who says that they’re getting marriage right is lying,’ Emily smiles. ‘We have lots of difficult times, but they’re fundamentally outweighed by the good bits. There’s a lot of good luck and hard work involved in a marriage. You have to make every effort to communicate.’
They’d planned a huge silver-wedding bash, but instead enjoyed dinner at home cooked by their daughter. ‘Actually, the fact we couldn’t do other things made me make more of an effort in other ways. I went back through loads of photos and put together a story book of our wedding and found Jack lots of little gifts online.’ Generally, the family muddled through lockdown.
‘My focus was producing three meals a day and keeping everybody from killing each other,’ Emily laughs. She and Jack both had Covid last March. ‘It was very unpleasant. I had a temperature which I couldn’t get down and he still hasn’t recovered his sense of taste or smell. We were like, “Kids, open a can of beans and exhaust the dog in the garden.”’
Throughout, Emily had no idea if she’d ever be able to film Too Close, the psychological thriller she’d signed up to for ITV before the outbreak of the pandemic. She was delighted when it was given the green light in September. ‘They were incredibly strict with [Covid] protocols, which is tricky when you’re making something called Too Close,’ she says wryly.
In the gripping three-parter, Emily plays a forensic psychiatrist working with a woman (Denise Gough) who’s committed a horrific crime. Their relationship is full of mind games; the drama also has plenty of sex scenes, which – as is now the norm – were supervised by an intimacy coordinator, who lays out the movements as though they were performing a stunt, to save both actors’ blushes and potential harassment issues.
Many actors welcome these coordinators but for an experienced pro such as Emily they’re unnecessary. ‘I really can look after myself, nobody is going to mess with me,’ she smiles. ‘Even in Breaking the Waves, I didn’t take any crap.’
This fierce sense of self-worth helped Emily navigate Hollywood, where she spent a lot of time in the early 2000s, at a point when it was dominated by predatory figures such as Harvey Weinstein, now serving a 23-year prison sentence for rape and sexual assault.
‘When I first turned up in Hollywood my bull**** detector was going “nee-naw, nee-naw”. It just didn’t feel like a safe or relaxing place.’ Many actresses have spoken of the pressures they’ve felt to lose weight or have plastic surgery. ‘It’s just depressing,’ Emily agrees. ‘I couldn’t stay. I wouldn’t have felt myself.’
At a film screening with her parents in 2002
The industry back then was obsessed with very young, gorgeous women and Emily assumed that – like most actresses – her working days were numbered. In fact, to her delight, her career has coincided with a new market for tales about middle-aged women, with 50-something peers such as Helena Bonham Carter, Robin Wright and Nicole Kidman going from strength to strength.
‘We’ve finally got to a stage where we respect people with age and experience and see them as role models,’ says Emily, who’s currently isolating from her family before starting work on a ‘very exciting’ film. ‘I’m being offered a lot of interesting roles now and it’s glorious.’
Having once been described as ‘a character actress who gets laid’, Emily is amused that plenty of these roles still involve what her grandmother used to call ‘hospital scenes’ – in other words, ones with plenty of nudity. ‘You have to be very Zen watching those scenes back, because every time you see yourself ageing. For a while I was like, “I can’t watch, I can’t bear it!” But that’s what life is: you change and grow and get wider and crinklier. For a stage you can be in denial about it, then you’re like, “Nah, it’s definitely there.”’
Her children have no desire to watch their mother play a role naked. ‘Only when I’m dead!’ Emily declares. ‘I’m their mum and that’s it.’
Over the past couple of decades, Emily has encountered many life-defining experiences, including the death of her mother from encephalitis in 2006. She flew back from filming in Australia to be at her side. ‘But five minutes before we got to the hospital I heard her voice clearly in my head saying, “I’m really sorry I can’t hold on any longer,” and a minute later my sister called and said she’d died. It was really hard, you’re so busy living your life you don’t realise all the things you want to say until it’s too late.’
Two years later, her father was diagnosed with bone-marrow cancer. Emily was able to spend more time with him, at one point dashing straight from Buckingham Palace where she’d just picked up her OBE, after receiving a call saying he’d taken a turn for the worse. ‘We’d been planning to go out for lunch. Instead, I literally rushed to the station in my finery and jumped on a train.’
Before his death in 2015, she spent three days at his bedside. ‘It was very special being able to support him as he left and hear him say all the things he wanted to say. One of the most heartbreaking things of [lockdown] is people not being able to honour others’ passing in the way that they need to.’
Emily is glad she was able to make peace with both parents about her childhood. ‘There were moments when my sister and I went, “What? Why?” But they had gone through a process of change, they weren’t the same people who had taken those decisions back then.’
While losing both parents has been devastating it has also been ‘a liberating experience. You spend so much time living for your parents’ approval and when they’re gone you can step back from it. But with that there also comes a sense of responsibility, that you’ve reached the top of the family ladder now.’
Emily feels even more liberated now she’s ‘got my head around the menopause’, which hit hard two years ago. ‘I’d wake up so stiff I could hardly walk, feeling about 900 years old. I thought: “Is this it?” There was all the irritability, confusion and mind fog.’ She was helped enormously by hormone replacement therapy. ‘When you’re weighing up the medical pros and cons of HRT you have to bring into the equation the devastation the menopause can cause.’
Now Emily’s loving the way life’s working out. ‘In my 40s I had that combination of young children and frail parents, plus I was trying to be the breadwinner – it was all very stressful. But emerging into my 50s, it was like a lot of life’s questions were answered: you know who you’re with, you’ve got the kids, you know what you’re doing. You can just step back a bit and spread your shoulders.’
Too Close starts on Monday 12 April at 9pm on ITV
