MY LIFE IN 10 PICTURES
Look back at Michelle Williams’ storied Hollywood career.
1995 A LITTLE ALIEN Michelle played the younger version of Natasha Henstridge’s half-alien temptress in the sci-fi horror film Species. In the scene above, “I break through three-inch-thick shatterproof glass, kill a couple of people along the way, and find myself in an open area with helicopters and guys chasing me and shooting at me,” recalled Michelle, who was 15 when she made the movie.
RAISED IN Montana and San Diego, Michelle Williams began acting in high school and joined the cast of the teen drama series
Dawson’s Creek in 1998. “I had a steady gig, which was great,” she remembers, “but I didn’t have the thing I most wanted, which was respect and a good sense of myself — I wasn’t viewed as an artist.” That changed when she played the spurned wife of Heath Ledger’s cowboy in 2005’s Brokeback Mountain and earned her first Oscar nomination. Since then, Michelle, who turned 40 on Sept. 9, has made the portrayal of emotionally complex women her specialty. She admits that she loves disappearing into a new role. “I have felt that between ‘action’ and ‘cut’ I really live. I’m free from all of my worldly concerns because I’m no longer myself,” says Michelle. Earlier this year, she married her Fosse/Verdon director Thomas Kail. They recently welcomed a baby, who joins
Michelle’s daughter Matilda, 14, at home.
“The possibilities are endless for me — Broadway, TV, music and film.”
— Michelle
1998 THOSE TEEN YEARS
“Something I’m grateful for every time I walk onto a film set is my six and a half years on Dawson’s Creek and the experience it afforded me in how to get comfortable with the camera,” Michelle said of the hit TV series. Yet the teen soap typecast her: “It was hard work to erase it and to ask to be looked at in a different new way.”
2011 BLONDE AMBITION
She received another Oscar nod for her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in the biopic My Week With Marilyn. “She wanted to be a serious actress,” Michelle said of the blond bombshell. “Comedy was almost a default. I don’t think she appreciated how fine she was at it.”
2016 SEA STORY Michelle nabbed her third Oscar nod for Manchester By the Sea,a gut-wrenching tale of a loner (Casey Affleck) and the tragedy that haunts him. “I knew I’d say yes to this film even before I read it,” she recalled. “That’s just the kind of artist [director] Kenneth Lonergan is.”
2005 AT FIRST SIGHT
She met Heath Ledger in 2004 on the set of Brokeback Mountain. “For him it was truly love at first sight. He was so taken with her,” recalls Oscar-winning screenwriter Diana Ossana. The duo dated for three years and had a daughter,
Matilda, but split a few months before his death in 2008.
2013 CHILD’S PLAY Michelle did Oz the Great and Powerful for her daughter. “Matilda went through a phase where she would say, ‘My mummy is Glinda the Good Witch, she’s a fairy princess.’ She thinks I could do magic.” 2011 MONEY MATTERS
Her co-star Mark Wahlberg got
$1.5 million for reshoots on
All the Money in the World, but Michelle made less than $1,000, triggering an outcry over Hollywood’s gender wage gap. In response, Mark donated his fee to the Time’s Up movement.
2010 WEDDED MISS “From Blue Valentine
I kept my wedding ring,” Michelle said of the romantic drama. “I actually kept it on for a while. After the shooting had stopped, I was still wearing it — I couldn’t quite take it off — and now I keep it above the kitchen sink where I do dishes, as a little memento.” She received an Oscar nomination for the film, which also starred Ryan Gosling.
Starring with Alan Cumming in a revival of Cabaret on Broadway, Michelle discovered the edginess of theater: “With movies, each day you carve something in stone. This is a changing, moving, breathing thing that nobody can pin you to — and that’s a new sensation for me.” That’s songwriter John Kander at right.
2014 LIFE IS A CABARET
2019 DANCING QUEEN Michelle won an Emmy for playing dancer/ choreographer Gwen Verdon in FX’s Fosse/Verdon opposite Sam Rockwell. “There wasn’t a dance that she couldn’t dance; everything was in her repertoire,” Williams said of Verdon’s range.
“Felt cute,” actress Alyssa Milano captioned this photo. And she is cute! Her heavy framed glasses are so wildly retro that they might have belonged to British Oscar winner Michael Caine more than 50 years ago!