GUTS, GUILT & THE MAKING OF EMILY WATSON

Julia Llewellyn Smith

She’s searingly honest about the ups and downs of her marriage, the therapy that helped her come to terms with her unconventional upbringing and how she rejected Hollywood as ‘unsafe’. In her most outspoken interview ever, the Oscar-nominated actress opens up to

was raised as a guilty soul and I’ve felt guilty ever since,’ says Emily Watson. ‘There’s been a lot of therapy in my life.’ Coming from the fun, totally down-to-earth woman chatting to me on Zoom, it’s a startling comment.

Laughing about subjects such as the dreaded middle-aged moment when you realise you need a chain to keep you from losing your reading glasses, or your teenagers’ mortification at your mere existence, Emily, 54, comes across as a savvy, wise friend.

Yet Emily’s life has been very different from anyone else’s I know. Obviously, she’s well known as one of our most accomplished actresses, with two Oscar nominations to her name – for her film debut Breaking the Waves and Hilary and Jackie in the late 1990s. More recently, she’s starred in numerous hit television shows such as Apple Tree Yard, Chernobyl and Little Women.

Her achievements come after what she calls a ‘very unusual’ childhood in North London, when her middle-class parents – architect father and teacher mum – became members of the School of Philosophy and Economic Science, which Emily’s described as ‘a quasi-religious organisation/cult’ based on Hindu teachings, where women had to wear long dresses and ‘keep their place’.

The family had no television and, while Emily doesn’t like discussing details about home life, other former members of the organisation – which flourished in the 1960s and 70s – have reported being banned from listening to music composed after the 18th century, plus spending hours meditating and studying Sanskrit.

Emily and her elder sister attended a school run by the organisation, which was accused of assaulting pupils following an investigation in 2005. She’s reluctant to go into details, saying she ‘knew how to stay out of trouble’, but she witnessed ‘incidents of extreme cruelty which have been very scarring for people going forward in their lives.

‘There are some very mysterious contradictions about my childhood,’ says Emily, who’s the mother of Juliet, 15, and Dylan, 12. ‘I ostensibly had a very loving family, but my parents put me into a situation that – with what I know now – I would never put my children into. They thought they were doing their best but there was a very big disconnect between what they thought and the reality.

‘People felt very obedient to the notion of it all, very

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