'NOW NOTHING IS ABOUT LOOKS OR ABOUT BEING A LEADING LADY.AND IT'S VERY LIBERATING' EMILY WATSON

Since breaking hearts in Breaking the Waves, Emily Watson has delivered countless screen masterclasses, from Gosford Park and Punch-Drunk Love to Apple Tree Yard. Now, the English star goes toe-to-toe with Cilllan Murohy in Irish drama Smeal/ Things like hese and fronts 1V prequel Dune: Prophecy. Is it her second coming? It's elementary, my dear Watson...

- JAMES MOTTRAM

I’ve been in shortbite mode,’ announces Emily Watson, sitting opposite Total Film on a comfy sofa in London’s Corinthia Hotel. Dressed in loose-fitting black slacks and a white blouse with a giant poppy print, she’s been talking up Small Things like These, the delicate new drama based on Claire Keegan’s novel. A day of doing short sound bites to camera isn’t ideally suited to Watson, a highly astute actress whose nigh-on three-decade career has seen her work with such mavericks as Charlie Kaufman, Paul Thomas Anderson and Robert Altman.

Ever since Watson broke through as Bess, the troubled woman in Lars von Trier’s 1996 drama Breaking the Waves, the die was cast. Winning her a first Oscar nomination for Best Actress (her second came just two years later, for cellist Jacqueline du Pré in Hilary and Jackie), Watson was suddenly thrust into the orbit of some of cinema’s greatest talents. ‘Things were coming in,’ she reflects. ‘[I just thought] “Oh, that smells right.” I just followed my nose.’

That nose of hers led Watson to working with the likes of Daniel Day-Lewis (The Boxer), Adam Sandler (Punch-Drunk Love), Christian Bale (Equilibrium) and Ralph Fiennes (Red Dragon) in the late 90s and early 2000s. While she’s never been a conventional leading lady, she’s arguably much more chameleon-like, going from, say, head housemaid in Altman’s English country-house murder mystery Gosford Park to the actor Tammy in Kaufman’s ‘bonkers’ meta-work Synecdoche, New York.