Early Life and Education
Watts was born in Shoreham, Kent, England. She is the daughter of Myfanwy Edwards (née Roberts), a Welsh antiques dealer and costume and set designer, and Peter Watts, an English road manager and sound engineer who worked with Pink Floyd. Her parents divorced when she was four years old. After the divorce, Watts and her brother, Ben, were raised by their grandparents and two aunts, as well as her mother. Watts' mother relocated the family several times around Wales and England, in most cases to be near a new boyfriend. Peter Watts left Pink Floyd in 1974, and he and Myfanwy were later reconciled. Two years later, in August 1976, he was found dead in his flat of Notting Hill of an apparent heroin overdose.
Following his death, Watts' mother moved the family to Llanfawr Farm, on Anglesey in North Wales, where they lived with Watts's maternal grandparents, Nikki and Hugh Edwards Roberts. During this time, she attended a Welsh language school, Ysgol Gyfun Llangefni, where she carried out her studies for several years. Watts described her mother (also an actress) as a hippie "with passive-aggressive tendencies" and no money, who used to threaten to send her and her brother to foster care in order to get her parents to provide for them.
Watts has stated that she wanted to become an actress since she watched the 1980 film Fame. Watts moved to Australia with her mother and brother when she was 14, during the early 1980s (her maternal grandmother was Australian). Her mother worked as a stylist for television commercials, then turning to costume designing, ultimately working for the soap opera Return To Eden. Watts was enrolled in acting lessons by her mother. She also auditioned for television advertising.
She attended Mosman High School and North Sydney Girls High School, where she was a classmate of actress Nicole Kidman. Watts failed to graduate from school, after working as a papergirl, a negative cutter, and managing a Delicacies store in Sydney's North Shore. She decided to become a model when she was 18. She signed with a models agency that sent her to Japan, but after several failed auditions she returned to Sydney. There, she was hired to work in advertising for a department store, that exposed her to the attention of Follow Me, a magazine which hired her as an assistant fashion editor. A casual invitation to participate in a drama workshop returned Watts to acting, and prompted her to quit her job and to seek success as an actress.
Regarding her nationality, Watts has stated: "I consider myself British and have very happy memories of the UK. I spent the first 14 years of my life in England and Wales and never wanted to leave. When I was in Australia I went back to England a lot." She also has expressed her nationalism for Australia, declaring: "I consider myself very connected to Australia, in fact when people say where is home, I say Australia, because those are my most powerful memories."
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