She Just Makes It Look Easy

No one could accuse English actress Emily Watson of trying to duck out of intense, difficult, demanding roles.

That was apparent from her very first film, last year’s “Breaking the Waves,” in which she played a naive, God-fearing young woman from a Scottish village. She takes lovers at the behest of her husband, an oil rig worker paralyzed in an accident, and is ostracized as a whore in her community. The grueling role landed Watson an Oscar nomination.

Her latest film has required equal reserves of stamina and discipline. In “Hilary and Jackie,” which opens Dec. 30, she plays the virtuoso English cellist Jacqueline du Pre, whose stellar international career was overshadowed by periods of stress and discontent before being terminated by multiple sclerosis. In order to play Du Pre, Watson undertook three months of intense preparation before shooting started; she was taught to play the cello and visited London hospitals to research the effects of MS on patients.

Her efforts may once again pay off in award season; she received a Golden Globe nomination last week for best actress in a drama.

Watson is staying true to form in her next film. She has been in Ireland since September starring for director Alan Parker (“The Commitments”) in a film of “Angela’s Ashes,” Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of an Irish childhood marked by appalling poverty; the work also won the Los Angeles Times book award.

Watson plays the Angela of the title, McCourt’s long-suffering mother, bearing an apparently endless line of children while helping her family withstand illness, hunger and a wayward, alcoholic father.

“It’s tough,” Watson said with a sigh, relaxing in a hotel suite at the end of an arduous shooting day, lighting a cigarette and sipping at a glass of red wine. “Because of the subject matter, it’s relentlessly depressing. It is for me, anyhow--I think the kids on set are having a great time.”

Yet she thinks working on “Hilary and Jackie” was even tougher. Watson practiced so hard at the cello that her fingers would sometimes bleed. She put herself through a punishing regime of three formal lessons a week, each lasting three hours, and in addition went daily to a rehearsal room to practice for hours at a time. Ironically, Watson had studied the cello when she was a teenager in London, though that experience had nothing to do with her being cast as Du Pre.

“I was 14 and it lasted about six months,” she said. “I learned it very badly and ended up with a Grade One [diploma], the absolute basic. I finally gave it up because I couldn’t be bothered lugging the cello on the Tube.

“So I knew how to hold the instrument, and that was about it. I don’t really read music, so I had an enormous task on my hands. I had two cello teachers, and I learned the music by ear, then the fingering, then the bowing.”

By the end of her preparation time, Watson could play some 15 pieces, ranging in length from 10 seconds to two minutes. At one point during filming she was required to play part of Edward Elgar’s cello concerto (a piece closely associated with Du Pre) in front of a huge orchestra that included musicians who had played with Du Pre. After the first take, the musicians spontaneously applauded Watson.

“I felt I didn’t have the right to tell her story without preparation,” Watson said. “It’s intimate, dark and it goes into difficult areas of her life. Her legacy, the part the public knows, is her music. I felt I had no right to attempt the rest of it unless I could get close to what she was musically.”

Du Pre’s life was certainly complicated. She was a child prodigy, and her family went to great lengths to accommodate her remarkable gifts as a cellist. Her older sister Hilary (played in the film by Rachel Griffiths) was the first of the two sisters to show musical talent, but she effectively shelved her promising career after Jacqueline’s sheer virtuosity monopolized her family’s attention.

Watson portrays Jacqueline as a sometimes disturbed home-loving girl who suffered extreme bouts of loneliness traveling the world from concert to concert. Later she met and married another musical genius, the charismatic conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim (James Frain). But under immense stress, she relinquished her grueling schedule, seeking refuge at the rural farmhouse of Hilary and her husband, Kiffer Finzi (David Morrissey). She told Hilary she wanted to sleep with Kiffer--and with her sister’s permission did so.

“Hilary and Jackie,” the feature debut of British director Anand Tucker, is based on material in the book “A Genius in the Family,” by Hilary du Pre and her younger brother Piers, which they were writing while the film’s screenplay evolved. (Barenboim has not commented on the siblings’ book but has allowed another author, Elizabeth Wilson, to write a biography of Jacqueline.) Hilary du Pre has seen the Watson film several times at screenings in London and has stated publicly that she is delighted with it.

But Jacqueline, who died at age 42 in 1987, is remembered with great affection in her native England, where there has already been controversy about “Hilary and Jackie,” even before its release.

Some of it has been decidedly critical. Leading music critic Norman Lebrecht, writing in the Daily Telegraph, called it “the seamy demeaning of a British heroine.” The filmmakers, he claimed, “prized a good story over common decency.”

Watson, who plays Jacqueline from age 16 to her death, has strong views on the film being intrusive. “Not a day went by when we didn’t ask ourselves that question,” she said flatly. “We’d wonder: Are we being responsible? But in the world we live in, people gather round celebrities and geniuses, and with a talented and vulnerable person, there’s a cost to that.”

Watson said she believes the film has been a cathartic experience for Hilary and Piers du Pre: “Jackie became public property, a great national figure who died of MS. Hilary heard of her own sister’s death on the radio. For them to be able to say, ‘This is how much it cost for her to be Jacqueline du Pre’ is amazing. They all devoted their lives to Jackie for a long time.”

Watson questioned Hilary on the delicate question of allowing her sister to sleep with her husband, asking if she now regretted it. “Hilary told me she would never have forgiven herself if she hadn’t done that for her sister,” Watson said. “The way I see it, Jackie had reached breaking point. She was going through incredibly strong depressions. She was in serious danger of harming herself. And I think that time she spent with Hilary and Kiffer did pull her back from the brink.”

What caused the downward spiral? “I think she found herself as a grown woman, saying, ‘Where’s my life?’ ” Watson reflected. “She was traveling the world but very lonely. She hadn’t chosen that.”

Watson, 31, has experienced massive doses of celebrity herself since the release of “Breaking the Waves” in 1996. And she has been in huge demand for several film roles since, including “The Boxer,” (1997) another story set in Ireland in which she starred with Daniel Day-Lewis. She lives quietly and out of the public gaze in London with her husband, actor Jack Waters, whom she met when both were in minor stage roles in repertory at the Royal Shakespeare Company. But all the lucrative work that has come Watson’s way has given her insight into the whirlwind, treadmill celebrity existence that left Jacqueline du Pre feeling unhinged.

Since last year, when she worked on “The Boxer,” Watson prepared for and shot “Hilary and Jackie,” then went to New York for “The Cradle Will Rock,” directed by Tim Robbins. The film, due out early next year, deals with Orson Welles’ stage company staging a radical musical about steel strikes; in a large ensemble cast Watson plays a street waif who talks her way into the company. After a short break she returned to Dublin for “Angela’s Ashes.”

How is she coping? “Quite well, I think,” said Watson, smiling wryly. “But I’ve spent seven or eight months this year in hotel rooms, and however nice they are, something inside me aches a bit. Still, I feel OK most of the time. I feel my life’s my own. As an actor, you can say, ‘Stop.’ ”

And now she is saying precisely that. “After I finish ‘Angela’s Ashes,’ I’m taking several months off,” she announced. “I’m turning down all offers.”

When it is suggested to her that maybe she would welcome a change of pace, say a romantic comedy, she lights up. “Oh yes,” said Watson, with a knowing glance. “Given the sort of films I’ve been doing, that would be very much on the cards.”