here's a fear that comes with being the love interest of a 25-foot-tall gorilla -- and it's not what you think according to the ape's leading lady, Naomi Watts. "I don't like to think of being a movie star," the actress told Australia's In Style magazine. "And I do slightly fear it with King Kong. It's going to be such a large-scale picture in every way."

  Her misgivings may be well placed. Even Dino De Laurentiis' critically-panned 1976 version of King Kong managed to make a movie star out of an unknown named Jessica Lange.

  But the $200 million Kong that Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson is unveiling to the world this Christmas is directly patterned after the 1933 original. It's set in the same period with the same characters (Jack Black as blowhard filmmaker Carl Denham and Adrien Brody as the human love interest, playwright Jack Driscoll), and roughly the same plot (a mysterious giant ape is captured and taken from his dinosaur-riddled world on Skull Island and put on display for the entertainment of "civilized" men).

And Naomi Watts, who plays starlet Ann Darrow? Her story is analogous to that of the original Ann, played by Canadian-born screen legend Fay Wray. As with Wray, the 37-year-old Watts is a hard-working actress who's paid her dues in a tough town called Hollywood, and
already has a "name" and a body of work (including an Oscar nomination in Watts' case). And yet Wray -- who did a dozen movies within a year of Kong -- is now forever remembered only for her screaming.

  In fact, the two actresses got to know each other over dinner last year before Wray's death at age 96. "Naomi did channel Fay a bit. I just recognize little bits of Fay in Naomi's performance and I think that's deliberate," Jackson said in a satellite press conference from New Zealand earlier this year.

  But giant movies starring giant apes are not how Naomi Watts got where she is. Born in England, her life took a rough turn with the death of her father, Pink Floyd sound engineer Peter Watts, when she was only seven. Her widowed mother moved the family to her native Wales and then to Australia where the young Naomi got her start in front of the camera in TV series and ads.

  The actress took a leap of faith moving to Los Angeles in the early '90s -- as did her best friend, another fresh-faced Aussie named Nicole Kidman whom she met when both were auditioning for commercials in Australia. But where fate smiled more broadly on Kidman, Watts spent 10 years seemingly going nowhere. Highlights, such as they were, included roles in Tank Girl, assorted straight-to-video movies and a starring role in the horror movie Children Of The Corn IV: The Gathering (for which she was paid the princely sum of $5,000).

  There was also a labor of love, a Sundance Festival short called Ellie Parker, in which she played an at-wits-end Australian girl trying desperately to make it as an actress. Despite some good reviews, it disappeared. It has since been re-released. Vindication came in 2001 when David Lynch cast her in the acclaimed Mulholland Drive, playing, yes, a young woman pathetically chasing stardom.

  "So many times I've sat down in a hotel room alone, snacking on mini-bar food and feeling sorry for myself," Watts says. "My personal life -- with or without a career-has never been a bed of roses."

  Her problematic off-screen romantic life has run the gamut from a two-year hot romance with decade younger screen hunk Heath Ledger to middle-aged indie director George Hickenlooper. Meanwhile, she remains best friends with Kidman, and reportedly moved in with the actress for a while to give her a shoulder to cry on after her split from then-husband Tom Cruise.

  Watts has been on a professional roll, however, since Mulholland Drive. Commercial clout came with her role as the terrorized mom in The Ring (which grossed more than $100 million) and its sequel. And an Oscar nomination greeted her performance as a recovering drug addict struggling to deal with the death of her husband and daughters in 21 Grams, co-starring Sean Penn.

  "There is this misconception about me that I'm dark and mysterious because I always play the woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown," she says. And of course, Kong isn't likely to change that scenario. Although her terror was softened by looking at the very human features of Andy Serkis who body doubled the CGI character Kong as he did for Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Watts reveals she had plenty of face-time with Serkis in that role. "He was a pair of eyes for me to look at. There's a huge amount of emotion looking at eyes." In fact, Watts says, "There's something beautiful and heartbreaking about King Kong and I just knew Peter would take it to a whole new level."

- Jim Slotek