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.
