When Emily Watson came to Dublin in the summer of 1997, she brought a cello with her. She was here to co-star with Daniel Day-Lewis in Jim Sheridan's Northern Ireland drama, The Boxer, but she was already looking ahead, preparing for her next role - in Hilary & Jackie - as the flamboyant English cellist, Jacqueline du Pre, who died of multiple sclerosis in 1987 at the age of 42. Marking the cinema debut of British director Anant Tucker, Hilary & Jackie opens on a prologue detailing the close childhood friendship between Jackie and her older sister, Hilary, both of them gifted young musicians. The film documents Jackie's rise, while Hilary (played by Rachel Griffiths) withdraws from music into marriage to a young conductor, Kiffer Finzi (David Morrissey), and moves on to Jackie's own marriage to the pianist and conductor, Daniel Barenboim (James Frain) - and to her history of manic depression.
"I became involved with the film about a year before we actually started shooting," says Emily Watson. "There was barely a script and there wasn't any money in place then. I was completely hooked on Jackie's story, even though it scared me more than anything in a long time, but it was such a challenge - the physical challenge to get on stage with the cello so I looked and played like a world-class cellist. What was so rare, and so fantastic about it, was having three months' rehearsal."
She had three long cello lessons a week, and a movement teacher helped her re-capture Jackie's distinctive method of playing, which involved moving her entire body. She also met a number of doctors and talked to patients with MS.
"Playing a real person, the responsibility is enormous," she says. "I felt very close to Jackie. It was all pretty harrowing, though, especially the MS scenes. You have to get it right for a start and do your research. Jackie's illness was progressive, which is the worst-case scenario. She just got worse and worse. Most people who have MS go into remission and it's episodic. It attacks every function in the body in different ways and at different times. We tried to represent all of that."
Watson believes that because Jackie could play the cello so well at such a young age, she never had to develop like an ordinary girl of her age. "She came from this loving but very protective, stiffupper-lipped English background where nobody ever really talked about things. Then she was whisked away into Barenboim's world of international superstardom, never being in the same time zone for two days running. She was a kind of San Andreas fault waiting to go off."
The movie echoes the marital relationship in John Boorman's The General, in which the pivotal character enjoys a sexual relationship with his wife and her sister. With her husband constantly away and unaware that she is in the very early stages of MS, Jackie, exhausted from performing, and craving love and reassurance, turns to her sister Hilary and husband, Kiffer - and Hilary unexpectedly grants Jackie's repeated requests to have sex with Kiffer.
"People hear about that story and they're shocked by it," says Emily Watson. "It's very hard to get your head around it. We had to understand why it happened and the conclusion we came to was that Hilary and Kiffer dealt with it like it was a matter of life and death for Jackie. She was in such a terrible state when she came to them and told them what she needed. I asked Hilary if they regretted it and she said she would never have forgiven herself if she hadn't done that for her sister. I completely believed her. In her book she says life is like a bank account. You put things in and take things out. And that for her was a very expensive time."
The film is based on the book, A Genius in the Family, written by Hilary du Pre and her brother, Piers. "They saw the film and they absolutely loved it," says Watson. "It was very moving for me to meet Hilary. I didn't meet her until after we finished shooting the film. Her parting shot was, `Emily, please don't forget her'. How could I?"
Two things are immediately striking upon meeting Emily Watson for the first time. Standing around five foot nine or 10, she is a good deal taller than one imagines from the movies. "Everyone says that when they meet me," she smiles. "I imagine it's because I've worked with such tall actors, like Stellan Skarsgard and Daniel Day-Lewis", her co-stars in Breaking the Waves and The Boxer. And she looks altogether more attractive in person than in the mostly de-glamorised roles she has played on screen.
We met at a Dublin hotel last month, on one of her days off from starring in Alan Parker's film of Frank McCourt's best-selling memoir, Angela's Ashes, for which she was cast in the coveted central role of McCourt's much-suffering mother, Angela, struggling to raise her children at a time of great poverty and deprivation.
Watson fetches an ashtray as she settles down to talk, adding that she only took up smoking for the movie. "Angela smokes 40 Woodbines a day in the film," she explains. But this is Emily's day off. "I know," groans the actress. "I'm going to quit as soon as we finish shooting."
Given the succession of plum roles she has been offered, it's hard to credit that just three years ago, Emily Watson was virtually unknown outside of London stage circles. "It's all been a bit of a whirlwind really," she says. "I know I've been incredibly lucky."
Now 31, she was born in Islington in north London, one of two daughters to a teacher mother and architect father. "I always had an inclination for acting," she says. "I did some acting at school and I really got into it when I went to university, doing terrible student drama." Having graduated with a degree in English from Bristol University, she spent some time "waitressing and photocopying" in London before going to drama school.
She spent two years with the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company - "mostly understudying, spear-carrying or playing first wench from the left," she says. "I had one proper role there, as an heiress in The Jovial Crew. Then I went to the West Yorkshire Playhouse and played Hilda in The Lady From the Sea, and I did The Children's Hour at the National Theatre in London. So I really had done only three grown-up acting parts before making Breaking the Waves."
Helena Bonham Carter was originally set to play that movie's central character, Bess, and when she decided against it, its Danish director, Lars Von Trier, opted to cast an unknown in the role and his casting agent found Emily Watson in London.
Watson made a quite extraordinary film debut as Bess, a naive and deeply religious young Scottish woman whose life is transformed by marriage to an oil-rig worker played by Stellan Skarsgard. When he is paralysed in an accident, he asks Bess to have sexual encounters with strangers and to recount her experiences to him in hospital.
Playing such an intense and passionate young woman who suffers so much, she was thrown in at the deep end for her first film. "It was tough," she says. "But what I didn't know at the time was that I was in the hands of a master filmmaker, so it was fine. That character, Bess, goes through so much, through so many terrible things, but she was great company because she was so full of love."
To Emily Watson's surprise, the emotionally wrenching Breaking the Waves earned her an Oscar nomination as best actress for her first film. "That was extraordinary," she says. "I kept asking my agent to call them back to check they hadn't made a mistake."
Her second film, The Boxer, was no less intense. Set in Belfast but shot in Dublin, it featured Watson as a young woman who, while her husband is in prison, renews the affair she had with an IRA man, played by Daniel DayLewis, who, himself has been recently released from jail.
The movie's romantic strand was rendered all the more touching by the natural chemistry sparked by Day-Lewis and Watson in their scenes together, a series of sequences more dependent on their facial and physical interaction than on dialogueheavy exchanges.
"Daniel is the actor who goes the furthest and does the most preparation," says Watson. "For an actor of my generation to work with him was very special. I learned an enormous amount from it. He's right on the nail all the time. No woolly bits around the edges. He transforms himself in each role."
Philip Saville's film of the Julian Barnes novel, Metroland, set in the 1970s, proved an altogether lighter experience, with Emily Watson cast, for once, as a comparatively ordinary character, the suburban London housewife, Marion, who's married to Chris, a photographer played by Christian Bale. Their relationship is complicated by the return of his longtime friend (Lee Ross), who sneers at monogamy and arranges for a young woman to seduce Chris.
"Marion is a nice, quiet, prosaic, middle-class girl," says Watson. "Actually, I really like her. She's probably the most boring person in the film, but she's also the most solid, grounded and selfaware. She know what she wants and she just goes out and gets it. It was fun to play someone really centred like that. It's not my usual bent."
Emily Watson made her American film debut last year in Tim Robbins's The Cradle Will Rock, set in 1937 and dealing with the staging of a controversial play by the young Orson Welles (played by Angus McFayden). "That was a lot of fun," she says. "It has a huge cast, and I get to sing in it. That was the challenge for me, because I'm not a singer. At one point I had to perform before 1,500 extras, which was quite something for me. I start off as a street waif who works her way into the theatre company as a stagehand and then gets a part in the play."
Being directed by an actor for the first time was very satisfying, she says. "Tim is very actor-friendly and he gave everyone the time to get to where they needed with their part. He can really help you as an actor."
Returning from New York, she got to spend some quality time with her husband, Jack Waters, a stage actor whom she married in 1995 and who has turned to writing, she says. Then she was off to another film set, in Dublin, to star in Alan Parker's film of Angela's Ashes. She hadn't read Frank McCourt's book before she was offered the role of Angela.
"It's a beautiful, beautiful book. What I really love about it is the way that all these awful things happen, yet he has such a sense of joy and blamelessness. It's such a survivor's book. I met Frank shortly after we started shooting and he's a lovely man. He seems a bit bemused by all that's happened to him."
She says that she and Robert Carlyle, who plays Angela's hard-drinking husband, had come close to working together several times in the past. "So it's great that it's happened now," she says. "We get on very well and we tend to work in much the same way. I love his work."
As for the many inexperienced youngsters who play Angela's children in the story, she says they are wonderful. "I'll really miss them when it's over. They're all very open and very fresh and very innocent. They're just delightful." She doesn't have any children of her own - not yet, she says.
Her director, Alan Parker, is, like Watson, from Islington, and they support the same soccer team. "Alan is very, very straightforward," she says, "and he works so well with the children. He's very firm, but very kind. When you see him working, he's incredibly poetic in the way he understands and sees things."
As Angela's Ashes went into its final days of shooting, Emily Watson says she has decided to get out of the whirlwind which has taken her on such remarkable and intense journeys over the past few years. "I need to take a long break now, and then maybe take a change of direction. I'd like to do something a bit lighter next, maybe a comedy."
Hilary & Jackie goes on general release on February 12th