Naomi Watts would be secure in movie history IF.......

...she had only done Mulholland Drive. 

She deserves a lot of camera time.

- by David Thomson, The Guardian UK, Feb 24, 2011 

Who ever heard a bad word about Naomi Watts? And don't expect to read one here. Still, her latest film, Fair Game, where she plays the outed CIA agent Valerie Plame, with Sean Penn as her husband, made too little impression on all of us who like her. It seemed promising: attractive married people plus international intrigue, along with the suspicion of there being more to the case than we ever heard. Directed by Doug Liman, the movie turns out rather dull. Is playing opposite Sean Penn anti-chemical (this was the third time Watts had tried)? Or did the drama need to be shifted towards comedy? Being married to a "spy" may play best as a version of "Can you trust your wife?"

But if the Anglo-Australian Watts had only done David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001), she'd be secure in movie history. The way that dreamscape carries her from the archetypal blonde ingénue arriving in Los Angeles, to an accomplished actress in her audition scene, to a wasted wreck, helped make it one of the best films of this century. Lynch may not be a director to everyone's taste, but when he commits to a project he demands vivid presence from his players – and Watts has always seemed a loyal trouper, waiting (patiently) to have her talent seized.

There are other films where she has thrived: in Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong (2005), she turned Ann Darrow into so much more than a pretty, screaming victim – she brought the character to life with those elegant juggling and dancing routines from vaudeville. This was marginal to the picture, I suppose. At the end of the day, the story belongs to the ape. But Watts was a droll bonus in a leisurely epic.

She made a great deal of the self-centred wife in John Curran's The Painted Veil (where her lover was Liev Schreiber, Watts's companion in life – they have two children). She was ideal as the nurse in David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises (2007) and heartbreaking in Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams (with Penn and Benicio Del Toro). She was the available wife in distress in Michael Haneke's remake of his own Funny Games (2007), though that clearly could have had so many different players in its parts. You never felt Haneke really wanted Watts herself, and any actor depends on that wish – in a director and in us. The key to Mulholland Drive was that Lynch had found his film in Watts's intriguingly secretive erotic presence.

Those films are likely as well-known as her greatest box-office successes, the two parts of The Ring, where once more she was cast as a woman under insane stress. But one of the Watts pictures I like most is not well-known: We Don't Live Here Anymore (2004), her first work with director John Curran, taken from Andre Dubus stories, in which Watts, Laura Dern, Mark Ruffalo and Peter Krause play unhappy couples who start to interact. Watts and Ruffalo were among the group who helped produce this picture, and she deserves credit for backing an independent project. But being an actress and developing your own material is tough these days.

There are other recent films where it might have been nearly any other actress in her part: You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (Woody Allen has shown too little interest in his people lately); Mother and Child; The International. Yet there are big challenges to come: later this year should see Watts in Jim Sheridan's Dream House, about a house that is a nightmare (because of the murders it witnessed); and she plays the secretary to FBI chief Hoover in Clint Eastwood's J Edgar (with Leonardo DiCaprio as the boss). Beyond that, she is set to play Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik's Blonde, based on the book by Joyce Carol Oates. Watts has admitted to being daunted by this, and she is older than Monroe was when she died (Watts will be 43 this year). But Blonde sounds like something that must depend on her, and that's what she deserves – uncritical love, total trust, a lot of camera time, glamour and huge responsibility.