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Biography
Summer 2000 Update: "Tart", a movie Alberta filmed last year with
Melanie Griffith and Dominique Swain, is due out later this year.
She is currently filming the movie version of the successful
off-Broadway musical "Hedwig and the Angry Inch". Alberta Watson,
well known to television audiences as Madeline on the cable hit "La
Femme Nikita", has enjoyed a long and diverse career in television
and film. A native of Toronto, Watson began performing with a local
theater group as a teenager. She received a Genie nomination for
best supporting actress for one of her first movie roles, Mitzi in
George Kaczender's "In Praise of Older Women" Just a year later,
she took home the Best Actress award at the Yorkton Film Festival
for short films for "Exposure". Watson then headed to the United
States, living in New York and then moving to Los Angeles, where
she made several films including the cult horror classic "The Keep"
with Scott Glenn and the TV movie "Women of Valor" with Susan
Sarandon and Kristy McNichol. After returning to the East Coast,
Watson took a chance on a low-budget independent film with
then-novice director David O. Russell. "Spanking the Monkey" won
the Sundance Film Festival Audience Award, multiple Independent
Spirit Awards, and dozens of rave reviews for Watson's performance
as a depressed, addicted mother who has an affair with her own son,
played by "Saving Private Ryan" star Jeremy Davies. The next year,
Watson went on to play the far more stable mother to a teenage
computer genius in the box office smash "Hackers", and then the
wife of mobster John Gotti in the Emmy nominated television movie
of the same name. Watson returned to Toronto and continued to seek
out interesting roles in independent film, a quest which led her to
work with fledgling director Colleen Murphy on 1996's "Shoemaker".
While the film was not widely released in North America, Watson's
performance did not go unnoticed - she received a second Genie
nomination, this time in the Lead Actress category. The following
year, she won critical praise for another independent film, Atom
Egoyan's haunting "The Sweet Hereafter", in which she played the
mother of a child killed in a tragic accident. TSH, which boasted
an exceptional cast including Ian Holm and Sarah Polley, received
the Grand Prize of the Jury at the Cannes Film Festival and went on
to earn both Academy Award and Genie nominations. Meanwhile, Watson
had begun filming "La Femme Nikita", a television series based upon
the Luc Besson film of the same name. Her character, Madeline, is
the executive strategist of a top-secret government agency that
fights terrorism; a character who uses everything from
psychological manipulation to torture to achieve the organization's
ends. The series has received multiple Gemini awards, including a
1998 nomination for Watson for the episode "New Regime". Watson's
latest film, "The Life Before This", with Stephen Rea, Sarah Polley
and Catherine O'Hara, debuted at the Toronto Film Festival in
September 1999. She has just completed work on "Desire", another
project with "Shoemaker" director Colleen Murphy, and is about to
begin filming another feature film, "Deeply", co-starring Lynn
Redgrave as well as the fourth season of "La Femme Nikita". When
she is not on location, Watson lives in Toronto with her two cats
and two dogs. She has recently been introduced to the cyber world
and has an official web site at www.albertawatson.com.
Biography courtesy of the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com).
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Alberta Watson
