[NW2005 1stLOOK] 'Diana' a royal role for Naomi Watts - exclusive new stills from the film

Playing the beloved princess was the ultimate acting challenge.

Yes, Prince George has arrived. And this fall, his late grandmother makes it to theaters, as embodied by Naomi Watts.

The actress, who earned Oscar nominations for The Impossible and 21 Grams, tackles Princess Diana, in a drama that examines the last two years in the Princess of Wales' life. In Diana, opening in October, Watts transforms into the beloved royal to explore her campaign against land mines and delve into her relationships with surgeon Hasnat Khan (Naveen Andrews) and Dodi Fayed (Cas Anvar).

"I was nervous going into it and tried my best to say no a couple of times. But I wasn't at peace with that no. I guess I wanted to do it for all the reasons I was against it — the idea of doing this transformation and telling the story of someone who's wildly famous, albeit doing it in a sensitive way. She's a fascinating woman with a fascinating story that obviously ended in such tragedy," says Watts.




Watts, 44, didn't want to impersonate Diana in the film, which is directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel and inspired by the book Diana: Her Last Love by Kate Snell. She wanted to discover a unique side of her. "That was why I liked the script. It was a piece of the story I knew nothing about. I learned about it through extensive research. It's hard to discern the truth about this woman. There's so much information available. It becomes very confusing. I had to trust the story. There are facts that the story has been built around," she says.......

Diana died in a car crash with Fayed in Paris on August 31, 1997. To date, neither her allure, nor our fascination with her, has faded — she's even on the September cover of Vanity Fair. "I think she just encompassed so many things in a woman. She's like Marilyn Monroe. She wasn't overtly sexual like that but she had this wonderful warmth and charisma and vulnerability. She had strength and beauty and grace," says Watts.

Despite being one of the most famous and most hunted women, Diana raised her two sons, Harry and William, with some semblance of normalcy. Because of her tragic death, England's new royal parents and their Prince George are being afforded a degree of privacy unheard of in Diana's day. Watts, too, knows what it's like to be famous. "I've had a taste of that on a minor scale. It's felt big in my life because it's like nothing else now. But it doesn't match what she went through on a daily level," says Watts. "Someone like her could not make a move without planning it within an inch of her life. It creates a lonely existence and a paranoid state of mind."

Speaking of royals, did Queen Elizabeth or Prince Charles have any input into the film? "They're not available. They could end up watching the film but they won't actively make it known. They're aware of the film being made," she says.