Janet Watts, who has died aged 79, was an exceptional journalist. Her beguiling manner, seraphic smile and voice “ever soft, gentle and low”, like Cordelia’s, conjured from people such as the film director Orson Welles and author Iris Murdoch the insightful interviews she produced for the Guardian and the Observer for more than 25 years. She exuded warmth and sympathy while asking intrusive questions, laughing disarmingly at her own brazenness.
When she rang the reclusive actor Dirk Bogarde, he said: “You do realise I am 500 years old?” (He was 67.) But when they met, he was charmed. She saw through self-delusion and pompous blather: a Tory chairman’s “deadly verbiage” said nothing and left her limp; she got more from the writers Anaïs Nin, Rosamond Lehmann and the doughty PL Travers.
Marianne Faithfull “gives a cool interview”, Janet wrote, “relaxing into words I think she thinks I can’t print” (but of course she could, in the Guardian of 1974). Without being unkind, she wrote of the TV executive John Birt’s inscrutability: “In a face that gives nothing away, John Birt smiles. It is an affable, unreadable smile. His eyes look steadily through his spectacles.” The writer Alan Bennett, in his “drooping tweed jacket”, warned that he was a far nastier person than his cosy image suggested. Miriam Gross, the Observer’s then literary editor, recalled Janet as “exceptionally honest, unbiased, generous and perceptive in everything she wrote”.
Born in Oadby, near Leicester, she was the second child of Joyce (nee Odell) and Frederick Watts, both headteachers. At Guthlaxton grammar school, aged 16, she won a scholarship to Oxford to study English, but had to fill in time working in a library before taking up her place at Somerville College. John Dodgson, who became her university boyfriend and lifelong friend, recalled her beavering away in her top-storey eyrie at an essay on Hamlet, the central thesis of which she felt was a resolution of contrarieties, just as in her own life.
Graduating in 1964 with a rare congratulatory first, Janet was at once recruited by the diplomatic service, but soon found a preferable job on the Times Educational Supplement, under Walter James, who became her mentor.
Moving to the Evening Standard Londoner’s Diary (where she and I met in 1969), she stood out among the Old Etonians in her demure Liberty print frocks with collars, reminiscent of Virginia Woolf. We knew she was a first-class intellect, but she had also been a star of Oxford theatre: playing Olivia in her first year (with Michael York, Oliver Ford Davies and Annabel Leventon) followed by Brecht, Billy Liar in Julie Christie’s role, and Chekhov (with Maria Aitken). In 1966 she played Ophelia to Dodgson’s Hamlet in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in its first performance, directed by Stoppard himself at the Edinburgh fringe.
Soon after arriving at the Standard, she was sent to Aldeburgh to cover the opening concert. It became a diary legend of her endearing naivety that, when the editor rang the next day asking where was her copy, Janet explained there would be no story as the Maltings hall had been gutted by fire.
She joined the Guardian as a feature writer in 1972, moving to the Observer in 1978. In the early 70s she would host Sunday afternoon teas for a select group of literary scribes that included Jim (JG) Farrell, the Booker prizewinner, at her flat in Little Venice, west London.
In 1979 she had a son, Edward, now a documentary film-maker best known for the Bafta-winning For Sama (2019). As a single mother, Janet wrote in one rare personal piece (apropos a report on singles living contentedly) that this was not the ideal way to live. “I think this promotion of living alone is a lie,” she wrote. “I may have lived alone quite successfully in some ways, but I still think it is a pretty awful way to live … We aren’t designed to live alone.” A 1989 interview with the actor Anna Massey was particularly pertinent for her: Massey was divorced, with one son, and had undergone years of therapy.
Few guessed or knew that behind Janet’s glowing facade and seemingly charmed life she often found herself in a dark place. Later in life she was working on an unfinished semi-autobiographical novel titled We Are for the Dark (a line from Antony and Cleopatra), a story of depression and therapy.
In 2003 she left London. Journalism had lost its appeal – after 26 years of deadlines she yearned to live “in a different way” – and moved to a pretty house with a terraced garden high above the bay at Swanage, Dorset. She continued to meet her “Somerville sisters” annually, and in a publication produced by and for themselves at 60, Janet admitted that this move to hermit-like solitude had been a “slightly bonkers” decision. But she was learning the piano again, gardening, going on pilgrimages and writing poems. She took to spirituality and new age beliefs, and joined the parochial church council of St Nicholas at Studland.
In 2016 she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. In a specialised care home she rediscovered a sense of wonder at all things – including grandmotherhood – and reverted to the angst-free soul she had once been. After 60 years of close friendship Dodgson wrote: “The sadness of her decline cannot dim her previous brightness. And she was bright! In every sense.”
Edward survives her, as do two granddaughters, Orla and Ilona.
• Janet Isabel Watts, journalist, born 14 October 1944; died 17 August 2024
