‘I couldn’t have done this a decade ago’

Michelle Williams tells Jane Mulkerrins why she had to ‘become a bigger person’ to play dancer Gwen Verdon

If Michelle Williams “had 100 lives to live” she would choose to spend one in a marriage like that of Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon. “They reached their highest highs with each other, as well as their lowest lows,” says Williams, who plays Verdon in a glossy new television drama that tracks the star dancer’s fiery partnership with Fosse, the choreographer and director with whom she worked on such Broadway classics as Sweet Charity and Chicago (see panel, right). “She was the greatest interpreter of his work, and he was the greatest instructor of her art.”

By the time Verdon met Fosse, in a Manhattan rehearsal studio in 1955, she was 30 years old, had already won her first Tony Award, for Cole Porter’s Can-Can, and been cast as the lead in Damn Yankees, for which she would win her second. Fosse – a 27-year-old talent on the rise – had just been hired as choreographer of the latter. Together they became one of the most formidable couples in showbusiness, apparently unhindered by the fact that Fosse was still married to his second wife, Joan McCracken. Fosse divorced McCracken in 1959 and married Verdon the following year. In 1963, their daughter, Nicole, was born. By 1971, they had separated.

The drama Fosse/Verdon, which was nominated for 17 Emmy awards this week – including acting nods for both Williams and Sam Rockwell, who plays Fosse – comes to BBC Two next month. If it doesn’t shy away from the darkness cast on the couple’s relationship by Fosse’s addictions to alcohol and prescription drugs or his affairs with other women, including actresses Jessica Lange and Ann Reinking, nor does it underplay their creative achievements. They continued to collaborate professionally and never divorced; when Fosse died in 1987, Verdon was at his side.

“Bob said if they could have lived inside a rehearsal room, they would have stayed together forever,” Williams tells me. “Their creativity was their lifeblood, that is what kept them connected. They had this perfect creative symbiosis – and I am sure that was very exciting and sexy to be at the heart of.” She smiles wryly. “It’s just… that kind of volatility doesn’t make for a stable home environment.”

In order to recreate that charged home environment, Fosse/Verdon’s creators hired Nicole Fosse as a consultant and executive producer for the series. According to Williams, she revealed “a very broad spectrum of detail… everything from how her mother would pick unusual words, so her phrasing wasn’t what you expect it to be, to her memories about how they tested if the pasta was done by throwing it at the ceiling”.

Williams disappears completely into the role, nailing not only the physicality that made Verdon such a captivating dancer, but also her breathy, theatrical voice and idiosyncratic speech patterns. “I feel like I started prepping for this role at eight, with tap lessons,” Williams laughs. “Everything

I’ve ever learned I had to call upon for this.”

Before filming began, she spent many Sundays in six-hour dance rehearsals. How did she have the energy, I ask. “It’s fear,” she says. “There’s nothing as motivating as sucking. Especially for a New Yorker – we have such high standards for ourselves.” She also turned to meditation. “I don’t know how to say this without sounding weird – but I had to become a bigger person in order to play Gwen. I had to expand my consciousness.”

Williams, who will turn 40 next year, says it’s not a process she could have imagined putting herself through as a younger actress. “I am excited to feel the kind of strength that comes with ageing, getting to the place where you can first of all identify the thing that you want, second of all believe in yourself enough that you can achieve it, and third, be bold enough to ask for it. I couldn’t have done this at 28 and a half; I could only just do it at 38 and a half.”

Born in Montana in 1980, Williams moved with her family to San Diego when she was nine. Her mother, Carla, was a housewife; her father, Larry, a commodities trader who twice ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate as a Republican candidate. After making her film debut in Lassie at the age of 14, Williams legally emancipated herself from her parents – common practice for child actors at the time, to allow them to work adult hours – then moved, alone, to Los Angeles. By 18, she was playing tearaway teenager Jen Lindley in the soapy drama Dawson’s Creek, which kept her in steady employment for six years until the final episode in 2003. However, it didn’t give her what she has called “the thing I most wanted, which was respect and a good sense of myself – I wasn’t viewed as an artist”.

That recognition came in 2005 with her Oscar-nominated performance as the wife of a gay cowboy in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. On the set of that film, Williams fell in love with her co-star, Heath Ledger; their daughter, Matilda, was born in November that year. They split up after three years together and, five months later, in January 2008, Ledger died of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs.

Notoriously private, Williams has rarely discussed her personal

‘If they could have lived inside a rehearsal room, they’d have been together forever’