Biography of Alberta Watson

Canadian actress Alberta Watson has enjoyed a long and varied career in television and film.

A native of Toronto, Watson began performing with a local theater group as a teenager and then moved on to work doing commercials, television, and eventually feature films. One of her first professional roles came at age 19, when she played a leading role in the CBC TV movie Honor Thy Father. By 1978, at the age of 23, 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. Afterwards, she moved to the United States, working in both Los Angeles and New York for several years, but returned to Toronto during the 1990's and has made that city her home ever since.

Although she has appeared in numerous major commercial releases and hit television shows (such as 2004's The Prince & Me, 1995's Hackers, the Emmy-nominated HBO movie Gotti, the Oscar-nominated The Sweet Hereafter, Fox's hit series 24 and the cable TV cult hit La Femme Nikita), Watson has preferred independent (and especially Canadian) productions. These have included a starring role in David O. Russell's controversial 1994 film Spanking the Monkey, for which Watson won much acclaim, as well as roles in John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Thom Fitzgerald's The Wild Dogs, After the Harvest (with Sam Shepard, which garnered her a Gemini Award nomination), Deeply (with Lynn Redgrave), Colleen Murphy's Shoemaker (for which Watson received a Genie nomination in the Lead Actress category), and Choice: The Henry Morgentaler Story (for which she was nominated for yet another Gemini Award). Watson has also done a great deal of work in Canadian television, including the CBC Chasing Cain movie series and, more recently, Showcase's comedy series Show Me Yours.