Michelle Williams

Michelle Williams (born September 9, 1980, Kalispell, Montana, U.S.) American actress known for her delicate beauty and for the emotional depth she brought to vulnerable characters.

Williams spent her early childhood in Montana, where her mother was a homemaker and her father a financial trader and author. After moving with her family to San Diego, she began acting in community theatre productions, and in her early teens she made her screen debut in Lassie (1994), a film based on the long-running family-oriented television show. At age 15, having earned a GED at home, Williams became legally emancipated from her parents in order to pursue her acting career without being restricted by child labour laws. Not long after, she was cast as the rebellious outsider Jen Lindley on the teen soap opera Dawson’s Creek (1998–2003). The popular series provided a breakthrough for Williams, and she earned praise for the maturity of her portrayal.

Britannica Quiz

Pop Culture Quiz

Williams’s increased visibility led to roles in such films as the horror sequel Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) and Dick (1999), a spoof on the Watergate scandal. In 1999 she also acted in Tracy Letts’s darkly violent Off-Broadway comedy Killer Joe, which, along with her appearance as a young lesbian in the HBO movie If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000), indicated an affinity for provocative independent-minded fare. A string of roles in nonmainstream films followed, including leads in the coming-of-age tale Me Without You (2001), as a British teenager in the punk rock era, and in Wim Wenders’s sociopolitical drama Land of Plenty (2004), as a former Christian missionary in urban Los Angeles.

In 2005 Williams appeared in Brokeback Mountain, which centred on a secret romance between two cowboys. The film was a surprise hit, and her performance as the beleaguered wife of one of the men (played by Heath Ledger) was honoured with an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. By that time Williams had also attracted considerable attention for her off-screen relationship with Ledger, with whom she had a daughter. (The couple split several months before his death in 2008.)

As her career progressed, Williams continued to take supporting parts in such iconoclastic projects as Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (2007), a fragmented portrait of Bob Dylan, and Charlie Kaufman’s inventive existential drama Synecdoche, New York (2008). She won accolades for her nearly solo turn in Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008), in which she evinced the solitary desperation of an impoverished drifter. For her emotionally raw performance in Blue Valentine (2010), which sketched the story of a crumbling marriage, Williams captured an Oscar nomination for best actress.

Williams subsequently starred in the bleak western Meek’s Cutoff (2010), also directed by Reichardt, and as Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn (2011), which depicted events behind the scenes of the 1957 film The Prince and the Showgirl. Her nuanced personification of the iconic starlet was rewarded with a Golden Globe Award for best actress and a third Oscar nomination. After exploring interpersonal complexities in Take This Waltz (2011), as a married woman who finds herself romantically drawn to a neighbour, Williams played the good witch Glinda in Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), a film inspired by L. Frank Baum’s Oz series of children’s books. She made her Broadway debut in 2014 as Sally Bowles in a revival of Cabaret.

Special offer for students! Check out our special academic rate and excel this spring semester!

Learn More

Williams returned to the screen in Suite Française (2014), in which she portrayed a woman drawn to a Nazi officer in occupied France during World War II. In 2016 she starred in the Broadway production of Blackbird, playing a woman who seeks out the man who sexually abused her when she was 12 years old, and, for her performance, Williams earned her first Tony Award nomination. She reteamed with Reichardt on Certain Women, a drama featuring intersecting vignettes about three women in Montana, and appeared in Manchester by the Sea (both 2016), portraying the ex-wife of a man who is haunted by the tragedy that ended their marriage. For her performance in the latter film, Williams received her fourth Academy Award nomination.

In 2017 Williams appeared in Haynes’s Wonderstruck, which was based on the best-selling children’s book; The Greatest Showman, a musical in which she was cast as P.T. Barnum’s wife; and the biopic All the Money in the World, about the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, grandson of oil billionaire J. Paul Getty. The next year she showed her comedic skills in playing the boss of a delusionally confident woman in the romantic comedy I Feel Pretty and then appeared in the comic-book movie Venom; she also was in the latter’s 2021 sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage.

In 2019 Williams returned to television in the miniseries Fosse/Verdon, which centred on the relationship between choreographer Bob Fosse and dancer Gwen Verdon. For her performance, she was awarded an Emmy and a Golden Globe. Williams’s other credits from 2019 included After the Wedding, in which she portrayed a woman running an orphanage in India who makes a series of startling revelations when she meets with a potential benefactor (Julianne Moore). In 2022 she portrayed a sculptor in Reichardt’s dramedy Showing Up. That year she also starred in The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical film about an aspiring filmmaker. Williams earned praise—and an Oscar nomination for best actress—for her performance as the vibrant and supportive mother.