1994 was shaping up as a miserable year for Alberta Watson. She was bored and lonely living in New Jersey, here seven-year marriage - to a driver for directors and actors - was on shaky ground, and she was growing inreasingly frustrated with the work she was getting in New York, bit parts in TV series like Law & Order and The Equalizer, and movies so bad she’d rather not remember them, let alone watch them.

Watson needed a little bit of luck and got it: a phone call from a casting agent working for rookie director David O. Russell. Would she be interested in playing the mother in a black comedy that Russell, who has since directed Flirting with Disaster, has described as "The Graduate moving in truly uncharted waters"? Russell, 35, had only $80,000 to work with and couldn't offer her much cash. She jumped at it.

The movie, Spanking the Monkey, was shot over 26 days in upstate New York. The cast and crew, most of whom were rookies like Russell, lodged at a Bible camp, and the woman who lent them her rundown home for the set watched many of the scenes and entertained them all with anecdotes about her life. Susan Aibelli, addicted to vodka tonics and bedridden with a broken leg after a suicide attempt. Her son, Raymond, played by Jeremy Davies, is forced to come home from college for the summer to look after her, including helping her shower, while his father is on the road selling motivational tapes and having affairs. Raymond, full of raging hormones, sleeps with his mother after a drunkfest, and then manifests suicidal tendencies of his own. (Susan interrupts one of his attempts in the bathroom to tell him the burgers are ready). "She was really excited about the role," recalls Peggy Gormley, Watson's only close actor friend. "She worked hard to make the complexities of it real."

"I like difficult subject matters," Watson explains. "When you're trying to find a character, you find yourself looking under a lot of rocks."

Shortly after returning from filming the movie, Watson tackled some difficult subject matter of a more personal kind: She decided it was time to return to Toronto, and her husband agreed it should be without him. "We haven't spoken in a couple of years," says Watson. "I said some bratty things about him on a magazine article soon after the breakup, which he took too seriously."

Spanking the Monkey debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah in 1995. The movie won an Audience Award and critics raved about the sexy Susan Aibelli. Watson was a "born-again" actress.

"I became the quintessential Mother You'd Like to Fuch when (Spanking the Monkey) came out," explains Watson three years later, in her trademark husky voice. "All these younger college guys just assumed I was available to them when they would see me at functions." The 5-foot-8 Watson, dressed in black tights and a black knee-length jacket, is seated by the fireplace of a trendy Toronto restaurant on this snowy January day, in the Queen Street West area in which she recently boutht an old Victorian house for herself and her two dogs and two cats. Watson, who has softer featers in person than she does on screen, agrees that movie changed her careed drastically. "I'm offered more roles now," she says, trying not to lose herself in a sunken armchair." It's a lot better stuff than I used to get."

Clockwise from top: with Bruce Greenwood, The Sweet Hereafter; Randy Hughson, Shoemaker; Jeremy Davies, Spanking the Monkey.

That said, ask about her age, and Watson says she can feel her agent saying "Don't You Dare." "Perry (Zimel, her agent) would kill me if I gave my age. To producers, ther's a big difference between late thirties and early forties - unless you happen to be Goldie Hawn" Age hasn't stopped Watson from doing nude scenes in movies such as Spanking the Monkey and The Sweet Hereafter. "Sure they're difficult and sure there is an element of vanity in that I dont't have a 20-year-old's body any more, but once I get rid of those thoughts and concentrate on what I'm doing, I'm fine."

In truth, her age has been her best card. Besides the role in Spanking the Monkey, Watson has played a protective mother in direction Iain Softley's 1995 Hackers; received in 1997 Genie nomination for her work as a middle-aged woman in the low-budget Shoemaker, co-stars, with Henry Czerny, as a pregnant wife in the upcoming The Girl Next Door; and appears on TV each week as the manipulative, "maternal" Madeline on CTV's Nikita series.

It also got her a brief fling with one of the 1996's most controversial films. "I was in Crash and now I'm not," she laughs, of David Cronenberg's movie about car-crash survivors, which was full of X-rated sex scenes. "It was neat working with James Spader, thought." Watson played a sexy secretary who has a tryst with an advertising director, the Spader role. One scene had Watson masturbating beside a voyeuristic Spader, and in another him masturbating her. While Cronenberg felt "awkward" commenting on a person he had cut from his movie, Watson chalks it up to her and Spader's having had too good a chemistry. "David came to us on the first day of shooting - we had had some rehearsals together - and said, "We have to separate the two of you more because you look like you should go off and live happily ever after." Separating them meant cutting her role altogether, news she got from Cronenberg during the editing process. While disappointed, she understands the rationale. "From what I understand - I haven't seen the movie - there are very isolated, removed, unemotional relationships going on."

She may have crashed in Crash, but certainly not in Atom Egoyan's $5-million The Sweet Hereafter, the darling of the 1997 Cannes Film Festival and Genie Awards, and nominated for two Oscars this year. Watson plays Rita Walker, a woman stuck in a terrible marriage, running a dingy motel in small-town British Colombia, her misery compounded when she loses her son in the bus accident that is the central event of the movie. Publications like The New Yorker raved about her performance.

Atom Egoyan, nominated for an Oscal for best director for the film, was impressed with Watson's work in Shoemaker and, particularly, Spanking the Monkey. "That was an extraordinarily tough role," he says, "but she was able to pull it off - she makes the unbelievable quite believable." Egoyan originally had her in mind for either the part of Wanda Otta - which ended up going to his wife, Arsinée Khanjian - or Risa. He wanted Risa to look worn and was worried Watson was too striking looking, but decided they could achieve the right look.

Egoyan recalls shooting a steamy motel scene between Risa and mechanic Billy Ansell, played by Bruce Greenwood. "When she comes into the room with her parka on to meet Billy, and then slides it off her shoulders to reveal her underwear and bra.... Alberta brings real emotional authenticity to scenes like that without saying a word." Greenwood's favourite scene with Watson takes place later on, in the same motel room. "It was the difficult one where we had lost our children and we're in the room together, discussing how we got to this place. It was a lot to chew on. But she really delivered in scenes like that."

Watson had never worked with Egoyan before and was pleasantly surprised. "He has a great dry humour," she says, Egoyan returns the compliment: "There are few actresses like her - she has movie-star elements but is completely down-to-earth."

On February 9, the night before the Oscar nominations were announced, she was with other Sweet Hereafter cast members in New York, where they were being presented with the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures' 1997 award for best ensemble performance. Nervous, Egoyan went up to accept the prize from Francis Ford Coppola. He thanked the cast, which also included the likes of Sarah Polley, Gabrielle Roy, Maury Chayking and Ian Holm, but forgot to mention Watson's name. When the other cast members at Watson's table yelled out "Alberta, Alberta", Egoyan said, "And Alberta Watson from Spanking the Monkey." Watson, relieved, stood up and took a bow. It was one of those instances she wishes she could have shared with her mother, Grace, who died when Watson was just 19.

Born Faith Susan Alberta Watson, Alberta was always called Susie when she was growing up in Toronto with Grace - who was a factory worker - and a half-brother. Watson thinks the name Alberta came from her father, Albert, whom she never knew because he abandoned the family when she was a baby. Three other half-siblings with a different father lived with her grandparents because Grace couldn't feed all those mouths. "We moved around a lot," says Watson, "usually according to finances. I have only recently started to understand the difficulty of my mother's life."

She quit high school at 15 to hang out a FOG, a theatre company at Bathurst Street United Church. "It was all this alternative stuff," recalls Watson. "I really felt like I belonged there."

But FOG disbanded and at 16, Susie Watson got sidetracked, moving to a farm outside Toronto with a 27-year-old boyfriend from the theatre, along with other friends. They were hippies, into Mother Earth. Watson got bored, broke off the relationship and moved back to Toronto at age 17 to pursue acting. The first role she ever landed in something other than a TV commercial was in a CBC movie called Honour Thy Father, based on a true story. Still known as Susan Watson, she played a Greek daughter who defies her father to date a Canadian boy, and ends up murdered.

It was around the time of Honour Thy Father that Grace died of Hodgkin's disease. "Mom was always very supportive of me," recalls Watson, tears welling up in her eyes. "It would have been nice for her to have seen my work."

In 1978, when she was 23, she landed the role of Mitsy in George Kaczender's In praise of Older Women, co-starring Tom Berenger as loverboy Andras Vajda. The movie, based on Stephen Vizinczey's 1965 novel, was filmed in Montreal and shown at the 1978 Toronto film festival. Watson, now calling herself Alberta, played a nightclub singer who has a brief fling with Andras, a role for which she won a 1979 Genie nomination for best supporting actress. A year later, she won an award for best actress at the Yorkton, Sask., festival for short films for her work in Exposure, about a man's discovery of his girlfriend's lesbianism. But the awards didn't swell her head and in 1981, at age 26, she went off to New York, where she studied with Emmy award-winning producer and director Gene Lasko off and on for 10 years. "If I know anything about acting, I learned it from Gene," says Watson. Lasko, who has taught workshops with Sigourney Weaver, regards Watson as one of his prized alumni. "I hate to be poetic, but Alberta had magical qualities to her," he says. "She had a wonderful stage presence and serious good looks."

One of her big regrets from that period is not working with Martin Scorcese on the 1988 movie The Last Temptation of Christ. Watson had landed a role in the movie in 1983, but then Paramount decided to pull the plug. By the time the project got off the ground again in 1987, Watson was busy doing series work in Los Angeles. The Last Temptation of Christ audition was where Watson first met the Brooklyn-based actress Peggy Gormley. Gormley didn't get a role. "Alberta was gracious enough to call me (in 1987) to let me know a part was available (in Last Temptation)," says Gormley. "Actors aren't usually that generous." That time around, Gormley, who now runs a production company with actor Harvey Keitel, got the part.

Watson stayed in Los Angeles for a year and a half, from 1984 to 1986, but didn't like it. She found herself worrying constantly about how she looked and hating the functions that agents told her she should attend. She fled back to New York, to the TV work and bad movies.

It's 11:30 on a dreary January morning and Alberta Watson is getting restless. She's in Mississauga, Ontario on the set for the TV series Nikita, and she's between scenes, hanging out in her dressing room. "Let's practise lines," she says, handing me the script. "You be Nikita." Except for the slippers, she's in costume for Madeline, the evil master strategist in a ruthless government organization called Section One. Based on the 1990 French film about a female street punk recruited to be a government assassin, Nikita, now in its second season, has become a cult hit, particularly on the USA Network, where it's called La Femme Nikita and where, as of February, it was one the highest-rated shows. It was also drawing more than a million viewers a week on CTV, up about 30 per cent over the first episode, which aired February 24, 1997. The show has spawned Websites and fan clubs, and there is talk of Nikita conventions. According to New York's The Village Voice, the program is "cleverer than it knows... a funhouse mirror of the dystopic '90's workplace."

"Alberta has a very compelling combination of ruthlessness, compassion and sensuality," says the show's executive consultant, Joel Surnow, of why he chose Watson for the role, adding that they get tons of E-mail about Maddie. People can't seen to understand how she can be so ruthless. It's a character Watson enjoys but doesn't find difficult to play, except for memorizing the "techno babble" lines. "She's like a cyborg," says Watson. "She gets her job done no matter what she has to do. Her outward approach is civil and respectful, but she wouldn't think twice about ripping someone's heart out."

Watson, who spends two to three days a week on set, pulls in a estimated $10,000 to $30,000 an episode on Nikita, allowing her the opportunity to pursue other projects. When Watson wanted to do The Girl Next Door, directed by Eric Till, last October, for example, she was written out of a couple of Nikita episodes to accommodate the project, which will be shown on Baton/CTV in Canada, and is slated for international theatrical release. "As soon as I knew Henry Czerny was involved, I said I'd love to work with him," says Watson. "I had seen The Boys of St. Vincent like everybody else. And Henry was a delight. He's more goofy, more of a prankster, than he comes off." Watson plays Czerny's pregnant wife. They live in a small town, and he has a brief fling with the neighbour's teenage daughter, who is subsequently murdered. Czerny becomes the prime suspect. Gary Busey plays the sheriff.

The year before, she starred in Shoemaker, about a travel agent who falls for a Forrest Gump-like shoe repairman, played by Randy Hughson. Shot in Toronto for $600,000, the movie had budget problems, running low on film at one point. Watson got on the line to David Cronenberg - Crash came in handy, after all - to ask if he could send some over. Colleen Murphy, who is a recent Canadian Film Centre graduate, directed Shoemaker. She had seen Watson in Spanking the Monkey and also in a short film in 1995 at the Film Centre called What's His Face, about a brief relationship between a man and woman who meet in a bar. "The role of (the travel agente) wasn't a meaty role, but I felt Alberta could bring it ot life," says Murphy. Watson for her part had seen a couple of Murphy's shorts at the Film Centre, and decided to take a chance on the project. Watson received a Genie nomination, but the movie, which won two German film festival awards in 1997, did poorly at the box office. Murphy hopes it will be re-released here.

Watson is working on two more projects with Murphy. One, Desire, to be shot this summer in Toronto on a $2-million budget, is already generating buzz in local film circles. Watson plays a schoolteacher who falls for a younger man who turns out to be a child molester and murderer. It's not a murder mystery, Murphy says, but a more insightful look inside the mind of a child molester. The other project, slated for 1999, which they won't talk about because of potential legal problems, is based on the life of a real person. Watson thinks that could be the role of her acting career.

Watson's ambitions aren't titanic. She prefers doing low-budget films. She believes they give her more room to manoeuvre and take chances, free of top executives breathing down her neck. She would like to try a classic someday - Gene Lasko taught her not to be intimidated by Shapespeare - and wants to do more stage work. She once did a play by Tom Noonan in Los Angeles. "We performed at a small theatre along Santa Monica Boulevard, and I played this neurotic rich diva. She was a lot of fun, and the audience loved her."

These days, Watson has "small, very normal concerns in her life," such as how to stop her two shepherd-collies from barking up a storm in the neighbourhood and whether the Nicorette gum she's been chewing will help her quit smoking. She's also finishing renovations on her house. "When you're younger, you live for your acting, but I don't any more; people change, I've changed," says Watson, who now often escapes with her "straight-ahead guy" Ken, 10 years her junior, up to her cottage in Haliburton. She met Ken at an agency party. She initially thought he was an actor and wasn't interested - "I'm enough drama in a relationship" - until she found out he was a millwright tagging along with his cousin, a writer. Something the two of them don't do too much of is go to movies. "I'm not a filmgoer," she says, laughing at the irony.

Just when she no longer takes this business of acting quite so seriously, Alberta Watson is in her prime. So why not? "Do you want to know how old I am?" she asks me suddenly in her dressing room on the Nikita set. "I'm 42." Maybe Perry Zimel won't kill her.