9 Biggest Revelations From Naomi Watts' New Book: Her Experience With Early Menopause, Billy Crudup's Cheeky Remark and More

In Naomi Watts' new book Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I'd Known About Menopause, out on January 21, the 56-year-old Gross Misconduct star focused on her struggles with early menopause and infertility which reportedly had her "drenched in sweat, confusion, and shame."

"I always dreamed I'd be a young mother but never got around to it. Then I found a partner who wanted to be a parent, too," she said of Liev Schreiber, whom she shares two children with, in the book.

As they could not get positive news while trying to start a family, she consulted a doctor and found out she was nearing menopause.

Watts wrote, "What use am I if I can't bear children? Did I become an old lady without even noticing? How could I have let this happen? What have I done wrong? I flashed back to every time I'd ever done something I knew was bad for me, every crash diet, being on birth control for fifteen years. My body doesn't work because I abused it! I thought. Of course it won't let me have a baby, because I'm not fit to be a mother!"

After hearing about her condition, the King Kong star admitted to feeling like she was branded as "an unproductive, barren person." Despite Schreiber being nothing but supportive of her, she avoided talking about it and "tried to focus on not being menopausal."

Watts chose not to reveal she was in her early menopause already.

"I'd been warned ever since I started acting that calling attention to your age — when that age was not 23 or younger — would be career suicide. I was told I would never work again if I admitted to being menopausal, or even perimenopausal. Hollywood's lovely term for such women was 'u----------,'" she wrote in the book.

Watts also explained she was not a candidate for IVF due to her hormone levels, but she tried fertility drugs and intrauterine insemination (IUI) as she attempted to get pregnant. Still, none of those worked for her.

Two months after she finally became pregnant, she miscarried and faced a fertility crisis again while shooting Eastern Promises in London.

"A few weeks into the filming, I began to feel strange, and I went to a pharmacy — I can still picture it — and bought a British pregnancy test," Watts recalled. "In my rented house, I stared at the test and saw the faintest line appear. Then slowly it got stronger, until it was a full, clear, solid line. Undeniable. The line was yelling at me: 'I'm here!' I called Liev and told him. 'Wow! Well, let's see,' he said. He sounded cautious but thrilled, and I was beside myself with joy, though also afraid I'd lose this pregnancy, too."

Even when she was already pregnant, Watts still took motorbike lessons and filmed dangerous stunts for the scenes. A few weeks later, she finally "felt the first flutter" while doing a scene with Sinéad Cusack.

She detailed, "It was a sensation I'd never had in my life, but I knew instantly what it meant: the baby was moving around. The baby was real. The baby was fighting and strong. My eyes welled with tears. The scene was not sad."

Although Watts has a successful career in Hollywood, she reportedly feared her time in the spotlight would end soon after scoring her big break with Mulholland Drive in 2011 when she was 33.

The Oscar-nominated actress said, "When I'd hit my early thirties, people had started telling me that the time would soon come when I wouldn't be able to play a leading lady any more. Was this the end that had been foretold?"

Watts also wrote about her body image struggles and the time she started hiding one part of her body after reading a celebrity trainer's comments about her.

"If I wear a bikini it's not a string bikini. I'll make sure it's high-waisted, covering my belly button. I also started hiding my thighs after a trainer I'd worked with wrote about me in his book as being 'fleshy.' It got in my head!" she said, referring to celebrity trainer Rob Parr and his 2008 book Star Quality: The Red Carpet Workout for the Celebrity Body of Your Dreams.

While Watts and Billy Crudup already had their first run-in on Broadway in 2009, they met again on the set of their Netflix series Gypsy in 2017.

"There were no signals going off. I was in no mood for romance or flirting. I planned to hold myself together for my kids and keep my head down at work…then one day during a s-- scene, he spontaneously flung a pillow across the room while ravishing me with such passion that I blushed and broke character," said Watts.

She continued, "During one of those lengthy lighting changes, while we were having a meaningful conversation, we exchanged a look. It was held just a beat too long to be anything other than shared attraction."

Prior to spending her first night with Crudup, her Gypsy costar made a surprising confession after she went into the bathroom to remove her hormone patch.

"I didn't want you to see it because then you would know I'm in early menopause, which means I am old," Watts told Crudup, who blurted out, "If it makes you feel better, I've got gray hairs on my b----."

"Those to date remain the most romantic words I've ever heard, onscreen or off, and that includes the script of every movie I've ever been in. And even this same man's very loving marriage proposal, which came seven years later," she said about her husband.