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Michelle Williams (actress)
Michelle Ingrid Williams is an American actress. She is particularly known for her work in small-scale independent productions with dark or tragic themes. The recipient of several accolades, including a Golden Globe Award,
Williams has been nominated for four Academy Awards and one Tony Award. Born to the politician and trader Larry R. Williams, she was raised in Kalispell, Montana, and San Diego, California.
She began her career at a young age with television guest appearances and made her feature film debut in the family film Lassie. At 15 she gained emancipation from her parents,
and soon achieved public recognition for her leading role in the television teen drama series Dawson's Creek. This was followed by low-profile films, before her breakthrough role in the romantic drama Brokeback Mountain,
in which her performance as the wife of a gay man earned Williams her first Academy Award nomination. Williams went on to gain critical acclaim for playing emotionally troubled women coping with loss
or loneliness in the independent dramas Wendy and Lucy, Blue Valentine, and Manchester by the Sea. For portraying Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn, she won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress.
Williams' highest-grossing releases came with the thriller Shutter Island, the fantasy film Oz the Great and Powerful, and the musical The Greatest Showman. On Broadway,
Williams has starred in revivals of the musical Cabaret in 2014 and the drama Blackbird in 2016. For playing a sexually abused woman in Blackbird, she received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.
Despite significant media attention, Williams is reticent about her personal life. She was in a relationship with the actor Heath Ledger for three years, with whom she has a daughter,
and she married the musician Phil Elverum in 2018.
1980–1995: Early life
 [^]  Michelle Ingrid Williams was born on September 9, 1980, in Kalispell, Montana, to Carla, a homemaker, and Larry R. Williams, an author and commodities trader. She is of Norwegian descent.
Her father twice ran unsuccessfully for the United States Senate as a Republican Party nominee. In Kalispell, Williams lived with her three paternal half-siblings and her younger sister, Paige.
Although she has described her family as "not terribly closely knit", she shared a close bond with her father, who taught her to fish and shoot, and encouraged her to become a keen reader.
Williams has recounted fond memories of growing up in the vast landscape of Montana. When she was nine, the family moved to San Diego, California. She has said of the experience,
"It was less happy probably by virtue of it being my preteen years, which are perhaps unpleasant wherever you go." She mostly kept to herself and was self-reliant.
Williams became interested in acting at an early age when she saw a local production of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. She performed in an amateur production of the musical Annie,
and her parents would drive her from San Diego to Los Angeles to audition for parts. Her first screen appearance was as Bridget Bowers, a young woman who seduces Mitch Buchannon's son, Hobie,
in a 1993 episode of the television series Baywatch. The following year, she made her film debut in the family movie Lassie, about the bond between a young boy and the titular dog.
Williams played the love interest of Guiry's character, which led Steven Gaydos of Variety to take note of her "winning perf". She next took on guest roles in the television sitcoms Step by Step and Home Improvement,
and appeared in the brief part of Sil, a character played in adulthood by the actress Natasha Henstridge, in the 1995 science fiction film Species. By 1995,
Williams had completed ninth grade at Santa Fe Christian Schools in San Diego. She disliked going there as she did not get along well with other students. To focus on her acting pursuits, she left the school
and enrolled for in-home tutoring. At age 15, with her parents' approval, Williams filed for emancipation from them, so she could better pursue her acting career with less interference from child labor work laws.
To comply with the emancipation guidelines, she completed her high school education in nine months through correspondence. She later regretted not getting a proper education.
1996–2000: Dawson's Creek and transition to adult roles
Following her emancipation, Williams relocated to Los Angeles and lived by herself in Burbank. Describing her initial experience in the city, she said, "There are some really disgusting people in the world,
and I met some of them." To support herself, she took assignments in low-budget movies and commercials. She had minor roles in the television films My Son is Innocent and Killing Mr. Griffin,
and the drama A Thousand Acres, which starred Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange. Williams later described her early work as "embarrassing",
saying that she took these roles to support herself as she "didn't have any taste [or] ideals". In 1997, unhappy with the roles she was being offered,
Williams collaborated with two other actresses to write a script named Blink, about prostitutes living in a Nevada brothel, which despite being sold to a production company was never made.
Having learned to trade under her father's guidance, the 17-year old Williams entered the Robbins World Cup Championship, a futures trading contest; with a return of 1000%, she became the first woman to win the title
and the third-highest winner of all time.  [^]  In 1998, Williams began starring in the television teen drama series Dawson's Creek, created by Kevin Williamson and co-starring James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes,
and Joshua Jackson. The series aired for six seasons from January 1998 to May 2003 and featured Williams as Jen Lindley, a precocious and promiscuous New York-based teenager who relocates to the fictional town of Capeside.
The series was filmed in the small town of Wilmington, North Carolina, where Williams relocated for the next six years. In a review of the first season for The New York Times,
Caryn James called it a soap opera that was "redeemed by intelligence and sharp writing", but thought that Williams was "too earnest to suit this otherwise shrewdly tongue-in-cheek cast".
Ray Richmond of Variety labeled it "an addictive drama with considerable heart" and considered all four leads appealing. The series was a ratings success and raised Williams' profile.
Her first film release since the start of Dawson's Creek was Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, a slasher film starring Jamie Lee Curtis. The seventh installment in the Halloween film series,
it featured Williams as one of several teenagers traumatized by a murderer. It earned $55 million domestically against its $17 million budget. Williams has credited Dawson's Creek as "the best acting class",
but also admitted that she had not fully invested herself in it as "my taste was in contradiction to what I was doing every single day". She filmed the series for nine months each year
and spent the remaining time playing against type in independent features, which she considered a better fit for her personality. She has said that the financial stability of a steady job empowered her to act in such films.
Williams found her first such role in the comedy Dick, a parody of the Watergate scandal, in which she and Kirsten Dunst played teenagers obsessed with Richard Nixon. Praising the film's political satire,
Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly credited both actresses for playing their roles with "screwball verve". Dick failed to recoup its $13 million investment.
In the same year Williams played a small part in But I'm a Cheerleader, a satirical comedy about conversion therapy. Keen to play challenging roles in adult-oriented projects,
Williams spent the summer of 1999 starring in an Off-Broadway play named Killer Joe. Penned by Tracy Letts, it is a black comedy about a dysfunctional family who kills their matriarch for insurance money;
Williams was cast as the family's youngest daughter. The production featured gruesome violence and required Williams to perform a nude scene. Her socially conservative parents were displeased with it,
but Williams said that she found it "cathartic and freeing". Her next role was in the HBO television film If These Walls Could Talk 2, a drama about three lesbian couples in different time periods.
Williams agreed to the part after ensuring that a sex scene between Chloë Sevigny and her was pertinent to the story and was not meant to titillate. In a mixed review of the film,
Ken Tucker criticized Williams for overplaying her character's eagerness. When asked about playing a series of sexual roles, Williams said, "I don't think of any of them as sexy, hot girls.
They were just defined at an early age by the fact that others saw them that way." She subsequently made an effort to play roles that were not sexualized.
2001–2005: Independent films and Brokeback Mountain
The British film Me Without You, about an obsessive female friendship, starred Williams and Anna Friel. Williams played Holly, an insecure bibliophile, a part that came close to her personality.
The writer-director Sandra Goldbacher was initially reluctant to cast an American in a British part, but was impressed by Williams' self-deprecating humor and a "European stillness" that she found in her.
Roger Ebert praised Williams' British accent and found her to be "cuddly and smart both at once". Williams returned to stage the following year in a production of Mike Leigh's farce Smelling a Rat. Her part,
that of a scatterbrained teenager exploring her sexuality, led Karl Levett of Backstage to credit her for being "a first-class creative comedienne".
Williams played a supporting role in the Christina Ricci-starring Prozac Nation, a drama about depression based on Elizabeth Wurtzel's memoir. Dawson's Creek completed its run in 2003,
and Williams was satisfied with how it had run its course. She relocated to New York City soon after. She had supporting parts in two art-house films that yearthe drama The United States of Leland
and the comedy-drama The Station Agent. In the former, starring Ryan Gosling, she played the grieving sister of a murdered boy; it was described by The Globe
and Mails Liam Lacey as "neither an insightful nor well-made film". The Station Agent, about a lonely dwarf, featured Williams as a librarian who develops an attraction towards him. Critically acclaimed,
the film's cast was nominated for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast. On stage, Williams played Varya in a 2004 production of Anton Chekhov's drama The Cherry Orchard, alongside Linda Emond
and Jessica Chastain, at the Williamstown Theatre Festival.
The theatre critic Ben Brantley wrote that "she cannily plays her natural vibrancy against the anxiety that has worn the young Varya into a permanent high-strung sullenness".
 [^]  The German filmmaker Wim Wenders wrote the film Land of Plenty, which investigates anxiety and disillusionment in a post-9/11 America, with Williams in mind.
Kevin Thomas of Los Angeles Times praised Wenders' thoughtful examination of the subject and took note of Williams' screen appeal.
She received a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead for the film. The actress next appeared in Imaginary Heroes, a drama about a family coping with their son's suicide,
and played an impressionable young woman fixated on mental health in the period film A Hole in One. Williams returned to the comedic genre with The Baxter, in which she played a geeky secretary.
The film received negative reviews; Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe wrote, "Only when Williams is around does the movie seem human, true, and funny. Even in her slapstick, there's pain."
As with her other films during this period, it only received a limited release and was not widely seen. Williams gained wider recognition later in 2005 when she appeared in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain,
about the romance between two men, Ennis and Jack. Impressed with her performance in The Station Agent, the casting director Avy Kaufman recommended Williams to Lee. He found a vulnerability in her and cast her as Alma,
the wife of Ennis, who discovers her husband's homosexuality and infidelity. Williams was emotionally affected by the story, and in spite of her limited screen time,
was drawn to playing a woman constricted by the social mores of the time. Labeling Williams as the standout among the cast,
Ed Gonzalez of Slant Magazine credited her for "fascinatingly spiking her unspoken resentment for her sham of a marriage with a hint of compassion for Ennis's secret suffering".
Brokeback Mountain proved to be her most widely seen film to that point, earning $178 million against its $14 million budget. It won three Academy Awards and she gained a Best Supporting Actress nomination.
Williams began dating Ledger while working on the film. The couple cohabited in Brooklyn, New York, and in October 2005, she gave birth to their daughter, Matilda.
2006–2010: Work with auteurs
Williams had two film releases in 2006. She first featured opposite Paul Giamatti in the drama The Hawk Is Dying. Five months after giving birth to her daughter,
she returned to work on Ethan Hawke's directorial venture The Hottest State, based on his own novel. Leslie Felperin of Variety found her role to be too brief. Following the awards season success of Brokeback Mountain,
Williams was unsure of what to do next. After six months of indecision, she agreed to a small part in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, a musical inspired by the life of Bob Dylan.
She was then attracted to the part of an enigmatic seductress named S in the 2008 crime thriller Deception. The film, which co-starred Hugh Jackman and Ewan McGregor, was considered by critics to be middling
and predictable. In her next release, Incendiary, based on Chris Cleave's novel of the same name, Williams reteamed with McGregor to play a woman whose family is killed in a terrorist attack.
In his review for The Independent, Robert Hanks called it "sloppy", and said that Williams deserved better.  [^]  Williams' two other releases of 2008 were better received.
The screenwriter Charlie Kaufman was impressed with her comic timing in Dick and thus cast her in his directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, an ensemble experimental drama headlined by Philip Seymour Hoffman.
It was a box office bomb and polarized critics, although Roger Ebert named it the best film of the decade. Two days after finishing work on Synecdoche, New York, Williams began filming Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy,
playing the part of a poor and lonesome young woman traveling with her dog and looking for employment. With a shoestring budget of $300,000, the film was shot on location in Portland, Oregon, with a largely volunteer crew.
Williams had just separated from Ledger and was relieved for the anonymity the project provided. She was pleased with Reichardt's minimalistic approach and identified with her character's self-sufficiency and fortitude.
Sam Adams of Los Angeles Times found Williams' performance to be "remarkable not only for its depth, but for its stillness"
and Mick LaSalle commended her for effectively conveying a "lived-in sense of always having been close to the economic brink". While filming in Sweden for her next project, Mammoth,
news broke that Ledger had died from an accidental intoxication from prescription drugs. Although Williams continued filming, she later said, "It was horrible. I don't remember most of it." In her first public statement,
a week after Ledger's death, Williams expressed her heartbreak and described Ledger's spirit as surviving in their daughter. Later that month she attended his memorial and funeral services.
Mammoth was directed by the Swedish director Lukas Moodysson and featured Williams and Gael García Bernal as a couple dealing with issues stemming from globalization. Her role was that of an established surgeon,
a part she deemed herself too young to logically play. In the same year she co-starred with Natalie Portman in a Roman Polanski-directed faux perfume commercial called Greed. For her next project,
Martin Scorsese cast her opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in the psychological thriller Shutter Island. Based on Dennis Lehane's novel, it featured her as a depressed housewife who drowns her own children.
The high-profile production marked a departure for her, and she found it difficult to adjust to the slower pace of filming. In preparation, she read case studies on infanticide. After finishing work on the film in 2008,
Williams admitted that playing a series of troubled women coupled with her own personal difficulties had taken an emotional toll on her. She took a year off work to focus on her daughter. Shutter Island was released in 2010
and was a commercial success, grossing over $294 million worldwide. Williams first read the script of Derek Cianfrance's romantic drama Blue Valentine at age 21. When funding came through after years of delay,
she was reluctant to accept the offer as filming in California would take her away from her daughter for too long. Keen to have her in the film, Cianfrance decided to film it near Brooklyn, where Williams lived.
Co-starring Ryan Gosling, Blue Valentine is about the tribulations faced by a disillusioned married couple. Before production began, Cianfrance had Williams
and Gosling live together for a month on a stipend that matched their character's income. This exercise led to conflicts between them, which proved conducive for filming their character's deteriorating marriage. On set, she
and Gosling practiced method acting by improvising several scenes. The film premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim. A. O. Scott found Williams to be "heartbreakingly precise in every scene"
and praised the couple for being "exemplars of New Method sincerity, able to be fully and achingly present every moment on screen together". Williams received Best Actress nominations at the Academy Award
and the Golden Globe Award ceremonies. In her final film release of 2010, Williams reunited with Reichardt for the western Meek's Cutoff. Set in 1854, it is based on an ill-fated historical incident on the Oregon Trail,
in which the frontier guide Stephen Meek led a wagon train through a desert. Williams starred as one of the passengers on the wagon, a feisty young mother, who is suspicious of Meek. In preparation,
she took lessons on firing a gun and learned to knit. Filming in extreme temperatures in the desert proved arduous for Williams, although she enjoyed the challenge. Writing for The Arizona Republic,
Bill Goodykoontz praised the subtlety in both the film and Williams' performance.
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