Naomi Watts 2011

Naomi Watts

Watts's career began in Australian television, where she made brief appearances in commercials. The 1986 drama For Love Alone, set in the 1930s and based on Christina Stead's 1945 best-seller novel of the same name, marked her debut in film. The director John Duigan invited her to take a supporting role in his 1991 indie film, Flirting, during the 1989 premiere of Dead Calm, after a five years absence in film. She was starred opposite future Hollywood up-and-comers Nicole Kidman and Thandie Newton. The movie received critical acclaim and was featured on Roger Ebert's list of the 10 best movies of 1992. The same year, she took the part of Frances Heffernan, a girl who struggles to find friends behind the walls of a Sydney Catholic school, in the award winning mini-series^[18] Brides of Christ, and appeared in four episodes of Home and Away.In 1993 she appeared in another of Duigan's pictures, Wide Sargasso Sea.

The difficulty at finding agents, producers and directors during the transition from Australia to Los Angeles frustrated her initial efforts. Her financial situation led her to take a job out of the film industry, when experiencing problems like being unable to pay the rent of her apartment and losing her medical insurance. After a small role in the 1993 comedy picture Matinee, which featured John Goodman in the leading role, she landed the supporting role of "Jet Girl" in the futuristic 1995 film Tank Girl.

Throughout the rest of the decade, she took supporting roles on television, including the series Sleepwalkers, and numerous B-list productions, such Children of the Corn IV, in which children in a small town become possessed under the command of a wrongfully murdered child preacher and Bermuda Triangle, where she played a former documentary filmmaker who disappears in the Bermuda Triangle,. Much of her early career is filled with near misses in casting, as she was up for significant roles in films such as the 1997 The Postman and Meet the Parents, which eventually went to other actresses. In Dangerous Beauty, she played Giulia De Lezze. In 1999, she played Alice in the romantic comedy Strange Planet and the Texan student Holly Maddux in The Hunt For The Unicorn Killer.

Naomi Watts