Film: The ebb and flow of the mind

Is Emily Watson so entwined with her characters that she forgets who she is?

I'm meeting Emily Watson, the 31-year-old, Islington-born actress, at a fancy hotel in central London. I spot her in the distance, brows knitted. As she walks towards me, Watson exclaims "My heel's come off!" She adopts a pantomime "angry" voice. "I'm very cross, 'cos these shoes cost a lot of money." She walks around the back of her chair to avoid shaking my hand; sits down gingerly; then swoops on the tea pot and says "Shall I be mum?"

Reserved, self-conscious, maternal... It's all so very different from Bess, the passionate, guileless and childy-voiced Scottish heroine of 1996's Breaking The Waves. Yet all so in keeping with Marion, the character Watson plays in her latest film, Metroland - a suburban mother and housewife, described in Julian Barnes's screenplay as "definitively English".

Of course, playing closer to home doesn't always do wonders for a performance. And in Metroland, though she delivers Marion's wry one-liners with gusto, Watson ultimately fails to find an edge. To be fair, the film itself is rather tired. But even so... Watson, here, is as demure as Judi Bowker, as supercilious and fey as Sarah Miles. You feel you've seen this face, heard this voice, a million times before.

Nor does our conversation begin well - in fact, it goes from bland to worse. Example: I ask Watson whether, these days (what with the numerous best actress awards, the Oscar nomination and the highly praised turn alongside Daniel Day Lewis in The Boxer), people expect her to be a primadonna? Watson answers with steel-plated jollity. "No, because I just get on with the job. Of course, there are some who stamp their feet and have tantrums - but we don't talk about actors who do that!" She's all but looking at her watch.

The mood changes when we start talking about Metroland's Marion. Watson's telling me about the ways she's not like her character. "Well," she says, "for starters, I don't have a child, and I'm not... Oh my God," she gasps, "I was about to say I'm not married, but yes I am married, I am!" The pertness, somehow, has unravelled. For the first time she looks me in the eye.

I don my psychoanalyst's cap for a moment. Is this "forgetting" of her marriage status a slip of the tongue or something more serious? Watson got married to Jack Waters back in 1995, not long before filming on Breaking The Waves began. Breaking The Waves, you may remember, is about an all- consuming marriage but, as so often happens with film, it was Watson's relationship with her director, Denmark's Lars von Trier, that had to take precedence.

The director-star relationship sounds peculiarly charged. "One day," explains Watson, "we had a... discussion about something - nothing to do with the film - and he came to see me in the make-up room and I said `Urrgh, I can't talk about it now'. Lars came to me later," she continues, with a slightly sardonic grin, "and he was terribly upset. He said `Emily, you're unhappy with me. In these next weeks we have to tell each other everything - we have to be like husband and wife'."

It can't have been easy for Jack, at home alone while all this was going on. Then again, he was evidently on Watson's mind a great deal. She mentions one of the film's early scenes - Bess's wedding reception - during which Dodo (Katrin Cartlidge) makes a speech. "Katrin wrote that speech herself," Watson informs me urgently, "and she put in a little reference to Jack." Watson beams at the memory. "It was very sweet. It was her wedding present to us."

All these overlapping marital ties... Watson obviously has enough intensity to go round, yet there's no mistaking that air of blushy panic - as if she fears she's just about to let someone down. Certainly, she's one of the most morally anxious interviewees I've encountered. "There is something a bit obsessive in me," she agrees, "you know, a lot of people thought Bess's conversations with God were completely nuts. But that's something I do. You have to keep asking questions of yourself - looking in the mirror and saying `What is my motive here? Am I being selfish?' "

Watson uses her little finger to mark out her thoughts. "There's one scene in Breaking The Waves where I felt the camera was looking right inside me..." Watson's voice is getting softer by the moment "... and I was feeling very guilty and selfish, I was like mea culpa, I'm sinful..." I can barely hear Watson - she's almost whispering. "That's the scene," she says, "that I found most exposing." She gives herself a big shake, like someone coming out of a spell. "That's what made everything so strange," she adds, back in control. "I was playing someone who was trying to be good and unselfish and then I found myself at the centre of a media circus. I just thought `What is going on?' "

Watson seems to equate attention with selfishness. I ask her whether she was always the centre of attention as a youngster. "Oh, I was the overweight teenager," she replies, with a big exhalation of breath, "chubby, I don't know why... I wasn't very confident. My sister always seemed thinner, taller and blonder." Her sister is an architectural publisher; Watson, it turns out, always assumed she'd "end up going into publishing". The two sisters are "very close" now, but how fitting that Watson Jr's next film should be the much anticipated Jackie, a portrait of cellist Jacqueline Du Pre, based on her (much over-shadowed) sister Hilary's biography.

Watson, I am sure, is a lovely wife and sister, but contrary to first impressions, she has little in common with Metroland's "definitively English" Marion. The clue was in the tea. Playing "mum", Watson managed to pour it all over the table, soaking everything in the vicinity. That's Watson. You expect a twee trickle. What you get is a flood.

Metroland's Marion happens to be one of cinema's few contented suburban housewives. But they're far from typical. Here are three commuter-belt females of more typically disillusioned aspect.

Three Bored Suburbanites

The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967)

Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft) the world-weary, louche West Coast suburbanite who seduces Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman), is unsatisfied by her role as wife and mother - witness her shocking lack of loyalty to daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross. Deliciously depressing.

Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985)

Rosanna Arquette plays bored, jittery, cake-devouring Roberta, whose growing obsession with the eponymous Susan (played by a young Madonna, in brilliantly round-tummied, slutty form) finally provides her with a taste of freedom, New York style.

Shirley Valentine (Lewis Gilbert, 1989).

Pauline Collins" Shirley has four walls for company - each one more stimulating than husband Bernard Hill. Liverpool's sprawling environs have never looked bleaker and even Tom Conti's ridiculous turn as the love interest can't spoil the sense of relief when Shirley makes it to Greece.