[Article] The Princess and I (Naomi Watts and Diana whom she played)

- By Stephanie Bunbury, Oct. 4, 2013, The Advocate

By the time Diana opened in London two weeks ago, all the talk was about the weird moment when Naomi Watts inexplicably bailed on an interview with BBC radio. After eight of the allotted 10 minutes, Watts can be heard on their recording saying suddenly that she had been given the wind-up, sorry; she had to go "to the next thing". A couple of seconds later, there are the resounding footfalls of her retreat.

It was baffling because, as the sound engineer who was sitting by her side in Claridge's Hotel is reported to have said later, there was no wind-up signal from anybody. Film journalist Simon Mayo's questions were perfectly amiable. Above all, Naomi Watts – who plays the title role in Oliver Hirschbiegel's film about the Princess of Wales' love affair with Hasnat Khan, a Pakistani heart surgeon, which ended not long before she died in 1997 – is the very soul of niceness.

Some years ago, a profile piece by the critic David Thomson began: "Who ever heard a bad word about Naomi Watts?" The answer remains "nobody". Because she didn't "storm out", as the tabloids immediately started to say she had. She made her excuses and left.

The interview, destined for the BBC's film review show, was all regular puff stuff. To play Diana was daunting, but "the idea of doing a transformation was a good one and she was a fascinating character", Watts says. The story was well researched, but the film "is not a documentary" and "creative licence had to be taken".

On repeated listenings, however, you hear the tightness in Watts' voice, then an audible catch suggesting the possibility of tears. The interview was recorded almost two weeks before the film's release, but perhaps she realised that, for the first time since her career took flight with Mulholland Drive in 2001, she was sitting on a stinker.

A little over a year ago, I visited the set of Diana. The atmosphere was cheerfully optimistic. Hirschbiegel, best known for his extraordinary film about Hitler's final days in his Berlin bunker, The Downfall, said he was the happiest he had ever been while filming.

Langleybury Mansion, the crumbling stately home standing in for Kensington Palace, seemed to have awoken from a slide into dereliction. There was much talk of the 100 costumes, the false nose that took an hour a day to attach and the €6 million ($8.6 million) of jewellery lent by Chopard.

Both Hirschbiegel and Watts said they had dreams about Diana. Hirschbiegel dreamt she tried to give him a sports car as a present.

"I just felt I was spending time with her," Watts said. "And one particular time I felt permission was granted – but that doesn't sound right on paper, so I won't go there. [This is] as close as I've ever wanted to come to a character."

Ebullient as the mood was, Watts admitted she was very nervous about playing the role. It took her a long time to decide to do it.

"Obviously, she is one of the most famous, if not the most famous woman of my time, and an awful lot of pressure comes with that," she said.

"You want to get it right, of course ... but you are just dreading people saying: 'She looks nothing like Diana! Why her and not somebody else?'"

Having decided to do it, however, she was giving it her all. "I'm trying not to think about it and to concentrate on the work. I'm sure I'll go back to the fear part when the film is ready to be shown. I think anyone with a creative mind fears judgment."

But Watts has always been drawn to scary choices, thriving on the difficult and demanding. She is at her remarkable best in extremis, whether emotionally or physically.

In 21 Grams (2003), she was sensational as a woman who lost her family in a hit-and-run accident and has descended into despair and alcohol. In her recent Oscar-nominated performance in The Impossible (2011), she spends most of the film struggling through churning debris after the tsunami in Thailand.

Alejandro Inarritu, who directed her in 21 Grams, was astounded by her emotional reserves. "She has the beautiful face of an innocent angel one moment, and the next moment she will have the face of the devil," he told The Observer. "It's like she has all these layers that she peels away. She's like a wild orchid."

It is also true that she is nervous before every part. Hesitating before taking a role, she says, "is part of my process". Perhaps this is because Watts knows, better than most, how easily you can be passed over.

The story of her slow road to success is well known – how she came to Hollywood from Australia in 1992 after being noticed in John Duigan's teen drama Flirting, how she languished in bit parts and terrible telemovies for more than a decade, packing her bags to go home several times but always somehow deciding to stay.

She was 32 when David Lynch cast her – on the basis of her photograph – in the mysterious Mulholland Drive, in which she played the dual role of a bubbly aspiring actress and a washed-up version of the same character obsessing over another woman.

It was a fearless, complex performance and she has been showered with praise ever since, but that doesn't stop her worrying.

When David O. Russell cast her in a comic role as a pin-up in I Heart Huckabees, she kept calling him to ask if he wouldn't rather have someone else.

"I was absolutely terrified," she remembered later. "Can I do this? What if people have enjoyed what I've done and now they see this and hate me and I've ruined it all?"

Perhaps she feels she really has ruined it all now. Reviews of Diana began to come out about a week after that curtailed BBC interview. Critics and the Twitterverse alike panned it mercilessly. It was "slow and terribly, terribly dull" (Daily Mail), "atrocious and intrusive" (The Times), "excruciatingly well intentioned, reverential and sentimental" (The Guardian) and looked "like a TV mid-week matinee" (the Mirror).

Many critics tempered their view of this "car crash" by saying that Watts had given it her all, that nobody could have delivered awful lines like "Is it true a heart can break in two?" any better than she had, that she had mastered the late princess's tilting head, breathiness and intense gaze with uncanny exactitude, that she was – to quote the Telegraph – "a swan in a turkey". But that would have been cold comfort. All any actor would hear in that sentence is the turkey's gobble.

Indeed, the one Simon Mayo question Watts answered with more asperity than nervousness was his observation that while the film was very much on Diana's side, it did show her ringing around the paparazzi to set up a "candid" shot with Khan.

"Right, well, I think if I was living with that level of scrutiny on a constant and daily basis, I would want to find a way to control it," she responded. "It's heartbreaking to watch that. It would make for a very isolating existence."

This is the cri de coeur of anyone who discovers the dark side of stardom.

Watts laughed incredulously on the set when it was suggested that, as an actress, she shared something with the woman described by her brother at her funeral as "the most hunted person of the modern age".

A few days after the BBC glitch put her in the news, however, she was snapped out shopping with actor Liev Schreiber – her partner since they starred together in John Curran's The Painted Veil – and their two children, her beautiful face half-hidden behind huge sunglasses. It was, for that moment, as if she really were Diana.

Hirschbiegel says that from the moment he started thinking about Diana, he saw her as an actress.

"She was the most complex character I've had to deal with," he said on the set. "When I started looking at the footage, I quickly came to understand the character was an old-fashioned movie star. When you watch that Panorama program [in which she uttered the famous line, 'Well there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded'], you are watching a very accomplished performer who is, at the same time, totally honest.

"I very much like Diana. I feel very close to her. I can imagine being her friend, but she was very needy and demanding – she would call her friends day and night – but in my mind she was a member of a tribe I love: actors ... Actors call you at funny hours too."

Watts is "the most powerfully gifted actress alive", in his opinion. "She is able to become what she plays. She is like an athlete."

Sometimes on set, despite the fact that she is so much shorter than the real Diana, her mastery of the princess' determined walk and that gaze from below the fringe made him feel as if he were watching a ghost.

She is also, he says with a chuckle, "a member of the tribe! I won't say more".

That almost certainly means that, in the face of a critical storm, Watts really will worry that things are ruined, even if she does have another clutch of films, including one with Inarritu, coming out over the next few months.

But in truth nothing will be ruined because, as Thomson said, nobody says anything unpleasant about Naomi Watts.

Diana opens on Thursday.