Natasha Richardson wears an unidentified watch

Late in Nell, Dr. Paula Olsen leans in from behind Dr. Jerome Lovell and wraps both arms around him, her face close to his, and a small gold watch on a brown strap rides on the wrist crossed over his chest. Natasha Richardson plays Olsen, a psychologist brought in from Charlotte to study the title character. Liam Neeson plays Lovell, the country doctor who found her. For most of the film the two disagree about what should happen to Nell, and this is one of the few moments the disagreement drops away.

Michael Apted directed Nell in 1994 from a script by William Nicholson. Jodie Foster, who also produced it, plays a young woman raised alone by her mother in a cabin in the North Carolina mountains, speaking a private language no outsider can follow, part stroke-slurred English from her mother and part words she had shared with a twin sister who died. Lovell finds her after the mother's death and wants her left in peace. Olsen and her colleagues want her studied in a hospital. A court splits the difference and grants three months of observation at the cabin, and over those months Olsen learns to hear Nell's speech as English rather than noise. Foster won the first Screen Actors Guild Award for a female lead and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

The watch is a small dress watch in yellow gold, with a round case, a cream dial, and a tapered brown leather strap. The shot is built around the two faces, so the wrist sits just off the focal plane, and no brand or dial text can be made out.

Off screen, the two people in the embrace were a couple. Richardson and Neeson had met the year before in a Broadway revival of Anna Christie, and they married in July 1994, months before Nell opened that December. By the time audiences watched Olsen and Lovell warm to each other, the actors playing them were already married.