Alberta Watson was born on March 6, 1955 in Toronto, Ontario. Girl start performing with a local theater group as a teenager. Watson then headed to the U. S., living in N. Y. city and then went to L. A., where she made several movies including the cult horror classic The Keep (1983) with Scott Glenn and the TV movie Women of Valor (1986) with Susan Sarandon and Kristy McNichol. When she returning to the East Coast, Watson took a chance on a low-budget independent movie with then-novice director David O. Russell. Spanking the Monkey (1994) 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 child, played by Saving Private Ryan star Jeremy Davies. Next year, she went on to play the far more stable mother to a teenage computer genius in the box office smash Hackers (1995), so then the wife of mobster John Gotti in the Emmy nominated TV films of the same name. Watson back to Toronto and continued to seek out interesting roles in independent movies, a quest which led her to work with fledgling director 'Colleen Murphy' on 1996's Shoemaker (1996). While film was not widely released in North America, Watson's performance did not go unnoticed - she get a second Genie nomination, this time in the Lead Actress nomination. The next year, she won praise for another independent movie, Atom Egoyan's haunting Sweet Hereafter (1997), in which she played the mother of a child killed in a tragic accident. The movie boasted an exceptional cast including Ian Holm and Sarah Polley, get the Grand Prize of the Jury at the Cannes Film Festival and get on to earn both Academy Award and Genie nominations. More recently, she made The Life Before This (1999), with Stephen Rea, Sarah Polley and Catherine O'Hara which debuted at the Toronto Film Festival in September 1999. Tart (2001), a film made with Melanie Griffith and Dominique Swain, was released in 2001. In the same year she also completed Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) and Guilt by Association (2001), in which she plays Oscar winner Mercedes Ruehl's sister. Other films due to be released this year include The Wild Dogs (2002), set in Romania, in which she plays a wealthy ambassador's wife who is drawn to helping handicapped children and Irish Eyes (2002), a tale of two brothers from a poor Irish family. When she is not on location, Watson lives in Toronto with her two cats and two dogs.