Naomi Watts was recently honored with the Golden Eye Award at the 2026 Zurich Film Festival, a recognition that comes as the actress reflects on a career defined by resilience. During the festival, Watts shared candid insights into the challenges that nearly derailed her early years in Hollywood and the personal health struggles she once kept hidden.
Before her career-defining break in David Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Drive, Watts spent a decade in Los Angeles struggling to secure steady work. At the time, her situation was fueled by genuine survival; Watts was facing eviction and was significantly behind on her rent while trying to establish herself as an actress.
Watts noted that her desperation was born from her reality of being “behind on my rent and getting evicted.” This period of financial and professional instability lasted ten years before Lynch’s psychological thriller provided the breakthrough she needed to move away from the brink of financial ruin.
That same sense of vulnerability resurfaced later in her life when she was diagnosed with early menopause at the age of 36 while trying to conceive. Watts has since spoken about how the diagnosis occurred at a time when she feared being perceived as “broken” or no longer fertile.
The actress has since transitioned from hiding her symptoms to becoming a public advocate for menopause education. In 2021, she founded Stripes Beauty, a brand focused on providing products and community support for women going through perimenopause and menopause. Her advocacy seeks to dismantle the stigma she personally experienced, moving the conversation from one of secrecy to one of health and empowerment.
Her current professional projects continue to lean into the complex, psychological roles that first brought her acclaim. Watts recently appeared at the Zurich Film Festival to promote The Housewife, a psychological thriller in which she portrays Hermine Ryan. The character is a 1960s homemaker with a dark history as a former Nazi concentration camp guard, a role that requires the same psychological depth that has defined her career.
Through her book Dare I Say It and her business ventures, Watts has linked her history of professional “desperation” to her later health challenges, framing both as periods that eventually led to a more authentic and controlled phase of her life and career.
