Naomi Watts will be honored at the Zurich Film Festival with the Golden Eye Award.
The festival said Watts is being honored for her “outstanding performance in Ben Shirinian’s The Housewife.” Watts will present the film in Zurich. She stars as the enigmatic wife of a suspected Nazi in the feature. Watts will pick up the award on September 26 and take part in a Zurich masterclass session.
“Since her breakthrough in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts has been one of the most fascinating actresses of our time,” Christian Jungen, CEO of the Zurich Film Festival, said in a statement. “Her greatest performances thrive on the tension between glamour and darkness, between what a character reveals and what she conceals – making her the kind of character actress Hitchcock would have loved.”
Watts was born in 1968 in Shoreham, Kent. She later lived in Wales before moving to Australia with her mother. After working as a model and appearing in smaller roles in Australian television productions, Watts moved to Los Angeles in the 1990s. Some of her screen credits include Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams, for which she received her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. A second nomination followed in 2013 for her role as a survivor of the 2004 tsunami in The Impossible.
Jungen added: “In The Housewife, she masters this ambiguity as an elegant and mysterious woman. At the same time, the film tells a true story that powerfully illustrates how indispensable investigative journalism is in uncovering historical crimes. Naomi Watts delivers one of the most compelling performances of her career, and we are proud to honor her with the Golden Eye Award.”
The 2026 Zurich Film Festival runs from September 24 to October 4.
