MICHELLE WILLIAMS has an Academy Award nomination, the open adulation of major filmmakers and a résumé that is striking in its worldliness and creative ambition. But if her career has seemed to progress almost inconspicuously, it is partly because of its introspective bent — small movies, subtle performances — and partly because it has lately existed in the shadow of her personal life.
Ms. Williams’s maturity and capacity for quietly wrenching pathos were apparent even on the teenage soap “Dawson’s Creek,” on which she played the troubled Jen Lindley. In her film roles she has revealed a gift both for screwball comedy (“Dick,” “The Baxter”) and bruising emotional drama (most memorably in her Oscar-nominated performance as the spurned wife Alma in Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain”). She has repeatedly taken chances on under-the-radar indies (“The Station Agent,” “The Hawk Is Dying”) while catching the attention of auteurs like Wim Wenders (“Land of Plenty”), Todd Haynes (“I’m Not There”) and Martin Scorsese (the forthcoming “Shutter Island”).
But Ms. Williams, who turns 28 on Tuesday, has become a very public figure for reasons that have little to do with her work. While shooting “Brokeback Mountain” in 2004 she fell into a much-chronicled romance with her co-star Heath Ledger. Stalked by paparazzi, their every move monitored in the gossip pages, the couple set up house in Brooklyn and had a daughter, Matilda. They separated last summer, but the tabloid scrutiny did not let up and if anything has intensified since Mr. Ledger suffered a fatal drug overdose in January.
It has been a difficult year, to say the least, and Ms. Williams acknowledged in a recent interview — her first in eight months, since Mr. Ledger’s death — that she has coped to some extent by throwing herself into her work. She has shot four films in quick succession since last summer, two of which had their premieres at the Cannes Film Festival in May and are due to open this fall.
In the anguished, comic head trip “Synecdoche, New York,” the directorial debut of the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (“Adaptation”), she is part of a vivid ensemble cast orbiting around Philip Seymour Hoffman’s harried theater director. In “Wendy and Lucy,” the independent filmmaker Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to the acclaimed “Old Joy,” she’s in every scene as a young woman living hand to mouth on the road when her car breaks down and her dog goes missing in a blue-collar Oregon nowheresville.

“I thought a lot about what you look like when you think nobody’s looking at you, when you feel completely invisible,” Ms. Williams said of her character Wendy. “Your entire life happens inside because you don’t think anyone notices you. Which is very different from me. Not that I don’t have any inside life, but I feel watched, all the time.”
As she spoke over a long lunch at a restaurant near her home in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, Ms. Williams occasionally paused and smiled wryly as if to acknowledge the unspoken connections with her off-screen life. “It’s all so personal, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s hard to talk about work without talking about things that are personal. Work is personal. I don’t want to talk about my personal life, but it’s on my mind, and it’s in my work.”
Confessing to being apprehensive and out of practice, she thought long and hard before answering questions, searching for the right words — “I want to actually represent how I feel,” she said at one point — but also taking care to avoid unintended disclosures. “It’s a fine line between wanting to be known and understood but also knowing what’s sacred,” she said.
One subject on which she willingly opened up was “Wendy and Lucy” — “probably the smallest film I’ve made,” she said, “and I’ve made some pretty small films.” (It is set to open Dec. 10, and will be shown Sept. 27 and 28 at the New York Film Festival.) Ms. Reichardt was worried that Ms. Williams would have trouble adapting to the microbudget conditions and to her plain-Jane role. “I feared that she was too pretty for the part sometimes, and I was concerned about asking her to go without makeup and not wash her hair for two weeks,” Ms. Reichardt said. “But I think she found that completely liberating.”
Ms. Williams said she relished the intimate scale. Shooting a tiny film on the outskirts of Portland at a time when she “felt particularly adrift” — she and Mr. Ledger had just broken up — she was grateful to find her character’s anonymity rubbing off on her. “I didn’t stand out in that community,” she said. “It was this perfect safe haven.”
“Making something out of nothing,” she added. “I’ve always liked that phrase, and I feel that way about this movie. We were working with so little in every way.” That minimalism extends to her tamped-down performance. Wendy is allowed one outburst but otherwise endures her downward spiral with stoic resilience.
To convey the character’s stubborn sense of purpose Ms. Reichardt showed Ms. Williams films like Max Ophüls’s “Reckless Moment,” with Joan Bennett as a suburban supermom driven to protect her family at all costs, and “Mouchette,”Robert Bresson’s single-minded portrait of a teenage outcast. “Kelly called me her Mouchelle,” she said.
Ms. Williams related to the self-sufficiency of her character: Wendy, heading north to find a job in the Alaskan fisheries, is something like a pioneer heroine for these depressed and exhausted times. “Maybe I read too much Emerson and Whitman at an impressionable age,” Ms. Williams said, referring to her tendency “to do everything” by herself. Her independent streak dates to her teenage years. After a childhood in rural Montana, she completed a high school correspondence course and moved to Los Angeles at 15, declaring herself legally emancipated from her parents.
Ms. Reichardt spoke admiringly of Ms. Williams’s expressive stillness on screen, her ability to tap into wells of emotion while appearing to do very little. “She can make an adjustment that is so subtle and so small it’s like she’s dialing in a station,” Ms. Reichardt said.
That kind of praise comes freely from filmmakers who have directed her. Mr. Kaufman cast her in “Synecdoche” (Oct. 24) partly because he had fond memories of her oddball turn in “Dick” as a nerdy teenager who lives at the Watergate and develops an improbable crush on Richard M. Nixon. “She can be really funny in really surprising ways,” he said. “I love watching her face change.”
Mr. Wenders, who wrote “Land of Plenty” with her in mind, spoke of her honesty, which “transcends any beauty and turns it into goodness, for lack of any other expression.”
There has been no shortage of fulfilling work, especially since her widely praised performance in “Brokeback Mountain.” Mr. Scorsese’s “Shutter Island,” an adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel that also stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo, is due to open next year, and two other films are awaiting United States distribution: “Mammoth,” directed by the Swedish provocateur Lukas Moodysson, and Sharon Maguire’s drama “Incendiary,” which had its premiere at Sundance.
Ms. Williams would seem to be entering her professional prime, but she is reluctant to capitalize on her recent successes. “I’m going to take a year off,” she said. “I think I stopped feeling creative a while ago, and I’m just realizing it now.”
She admitted to feeling the strain of being a working single mom. She reads bedtime stories to Matilda, now nearly 3, in whatever accent she’s practicing — East London for “Incendiary,” Boston for “Shutter Island” — but has had a hard time balancing the immersive demands of acting and the consuming duties of motherhood. “I used to have all the time in the world to daydream and even just to dream and let your unconscious do some of the work for you,” she said. “Now I’m up at 5 in the morning, and I don’t remember what I dreamed about.”
The bleakness of some of the roles has also taken a toll. In “Incendiary” she plays a wife and mother who loses her family in a terrorist attack; while preparing for “Shutter Island” she read case studies on infanticide. “When I work again maybe it should be a comedy,” she said. “I’ve always had a tendency for darker, more lifelike material. I think I had this sense that important things are heavy things. I don’t know if that’s true any more.”
In person Ms. Williams seems like nothing so much as your average 20-something Brooklyn hipster, which should perhaps be no surprise since she has been a New Yorker all her adult life. While making “Dawson’s Creek” she split her time between Wilmington, N.C., where the series was shot, and New York, where she found “wonderful friends who were all orphans in some way, not just actors but writers and musicians and painters.”
She is a little resentful but mostly rueful that she can no longer experience the city the way she used to. “I feel like that’s been taken away from me,” she said. “I’m worried what people are saying or thinking, or if they’re going to follow me, or if someone is going to pop out of a bush with a camera. I’ve started to shut down, but I also know I can’t let it dictate my life.”
She still finds herself reacting to the tabloid intrusions with bewilderment. (In recent months the talk has turned to a rumored relationship with the filmmaker Spike Jonze.) “It feels so surreal,” she said. “How is this my life? When did it get so out of control?”
To be a celebrity is to negotiate a gulf between private self and public image. “It’s a bit of an isolating problem to have,” Ms. Williams said, and so she was gratified to find that this was among the themes of Milan Kundera’s novel “Immortality,” which she read on the plane to Cannes, though she said she wasn’t sure she agreed with the book’s conclusion, “that the self people perceive is just as real because it exists.”
She is an avid reader who favors poetry over novels while filming so she’s not distracted by competing narratives. Looking ahead to her year off she said that she wanted to pick up a skill, some kind of handicraft. “I want to humble myself in front of a task like embroidery,” she said. “I like how physical work can really free your mind.” At a low point last year she signed up for night classes in bookbinding and calligraphy. “I was prouder of my little foldout book than of some movies that I’ve made,” she said.
Despite her claims of burnout, she still talks about acting with a kind of reverential awe. “I’m a Virgo, and I want everything to be fair and equal and clear, and acting just isn’t,” she said. “It’s kind of an incantation or a rain dance.” She loves the research process but is less thrilled about watching the end results (and often doesn’t). “If only the damned things never came out,” she said. “I get far too self-critical when I watch myself.”
In an e-mail message a couple of weeks later, Ms. Williams said she had been mulling over the questions that came up in the interview. “I’ve started thinking more clearly, my head hasn’t been so switched on recently,” she wrote. “I’ve always identified with loners and outcasts, I don’t know why. I guess this is why I found a home in independent film.” She added: “I wanted to work outside the system, which is why all this fame is a real brain teaser. What am I supposed to do with it? Can you work the system without it working you?
“Acting sometimes reminds me of therapy in that the more you talk about a traumatic or profound event, the more it loses its emotional tension. Switch on a bright light and find there is no boogeyman in the closet. So it is the same with a scene. Never tell the other actor or the director what you are ‘doing.’ ” The trick, she added, was to allow herself “to live in so much mystery, to rely on a feeling, an instinct, on faith, really, that everything I need is already inside me, and best I just don’t block the exit.”
Da The New York Times, 7 settembre 2008

Misteriosa e seducente come una star del passato. Scoperta da Ang Lee in «I segreti di Brokeback Mountain», scelta da Charlie Kaufman per «Synecdoche», il suo esordio alla regia, e da Martin Scorsese per «Shutter Island», il suo ultimo film, la giovane attrice e la promessa più luminosa del cinema USA.
«La protagonista del mio film è una donna chiusa in se stessa, che raramente si lascia andare alle emozioni. Michelle è capace di proiettare una forte interiorità e, soprattutto, anche quando è assolutamente immobile, non è mai "spenta". Succede sempre qualcosa sul suo viso, nei suoi occhi. Per questo ho pensato che sarebbe stata perfetta. E poi riesce a rendere credibile qualsiasi cosa». Seduta su un divanetto dentro al Palazzo dei cinema del festival di Cannes, parla la regista americana Kelly Reichart.

Il suo ultimo film, Wendy and Lucy, è stato presentato la seri prima, accolto da applausi a scena aperta. Molti di quegli applausi erano per Michelle Williams, la protagonista di questa storia di ragazza e cane, semiautobiografica e struggente, sullo sfondo di una Portland depressa e inospitale. Abbigliata in vintage Chanel color crema, la ventisettenne attrice del Montami (famiglia in vista - il padre è stato candidato repubblicano ai senato lavale - che lei ha lasciato a 15 anni per trasferirsi nel New Mexico. Tre anni dopo si manteneva già da sola recitando), assorbiva i complimenti del pubblico con quel misto di reticenza e sicurezza di sé che la rende tanto speciale, una presenza capace dell'aplomb di una star hollywoodiana vecchia maniera.
Scarpe da ginnastica, calzoncini corti, capelli tinti di scuro, l'andatura rapida e contratta, Wílliams «occupa» Wendy and Lucy praticamente da sola- il film non ha quasi altri personaggi. E la sua è un'interpretazione memorabile.
Al festival, quest'anno, aveva anche un altro film, Synedoche. New York, omaggio indiretto 8 e 1/2 ed esordio alla regia dello sceneggiatore Charlìe Kaufman (Essere John Malkovich, Se mi lasci ti cancello), che il critico di Time Richard Corliss ha già definito «il classico di Cannes 2008». Cast molto ricco, costruzione cerebrale, trame multiple, in bilico tra Fellini e Kafka, è un oggetto diversissimo dal film di Reichardt. Williams vi interpreta un'attrice di teatro, moglie del regista (Philip Seymour Hoffman) attorno a cui ruota il film. L'effetto è lo stesso: non ci si stanca mai di guardarla. Le basta poco - un'ombra di rossore improvviso sulle guance, gli occhi che si abbassano un istante - per dire tantissimo.
A Cannes, Michelle Williams non ha rilasciato interviste. Non parla quasi alla stampa dal 22 gennaio scorso, il giorno della morte di Heath Ledger, con il quale ha vissuto, e che era il padre di sua figlia Matilda (così battezzata in omaggio alla bimba magica di un racconto di Roald Dahl). Lo scorso aprile doveva essere sulla copertina di Elle, ma ha chiesto di essere sostituita. Però ha scelto di farsi vedere (e fotografare) sorridente tra le onde australiane dove gli amici e la famiglia di Ledger hanno dato un ultimo addio all'attore scomparso.
In realtà, un po' di mistero la avvolge da sempre, fin da quando, nel 1998, sotto le spoglie della bad girl Jen Lindley, è apparsa nella placida cittadina costiera della serie tv Dawson Creek, il cult per teenager che ha lanciato anche l'attuale signora Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes. La sua filmografia parte con un ennesimo sequel di Halloween, la commedia satirica sul Watergate Dick e il film da adolescenti comedy But l'm a Cheerleader. Prosegue con alcuni successi al Sundance Film Festival (The Station Agent, Il delitto Fitzgerald, The Hawk is Dying) ma anche La terra dell'abbondanzadi Wìm Wenders e lo non sono qui di Todd Haynes -dove interpretava una ragazza alla moda tipo Edie Sedgwick, di nome Coco Rivington. La nominaton all'Oscar (ingiustamente notata molto meno di quelle di Heath Ledger e Jake Gyllenhaal) è arrivata con I segreti di Brokeback Mountain dove era la moglie dei cowboy sensibile e taciturno Ennis, interpretato da Heath Ledger (i due si sono innamorati durante le riprese). «La parte della moglie tradita era la più insulsa dei mondo. Per questo avevo bisogno di Michelle», ha dichiarato il regista Ang Lee. «Basta. vederla per emozionarsi, sentirsi in sintonia con lei. E, infatti è riuscita a rendere, più interessante la tragedia di quella donna»« Quest'inverno, Williams ha finito di girare in Svezia Mammouth, di Lukas Modysson. E il suo talento è stato notato anche da Martin Scorsese, che l'ha voluta per Shutter Island, il film che sia girando a Boston.
Da Lo Specchio, Luglio 2008

La sua partecipazione all’acclamato film drammatico di Ang Lee I segreti di Brokeback Mountain (Brokeback Mountain) è stata premiata con una nomination agli Oscar. Inoltre, la sua memorabile interpretazione nei panni della tormentata moglie di Ennis le è valsa anche un Broadcast Film Critics Association Award e delle nomination agli Screen Actors Guild Awards, ai Golden Globes e ai BAFTA (sia come miglior attrice non protagonista che come star emergente). Nel 2005, Michelle Williams ha anche ottenuto il riconoscimento di ‘Star femminile del futuro’ da parte del Motion Picture Club.
Nel 2004, la Williams ha condiviso una nomination agli Actors Guild Awards per il miglior cast in un film con gli altri interpreti della pellicola di Thomas McCarthy The Station Agent. Lo stesso film, in precedenza, si era aggiudicato il premio del pubblico al Sundance Film Festival del 2003 e quello per la miglior sceneggiatura ai BAFTA nel 2004.
La Williams è stata la protagonista, assieme a Paul Giamatti e Michael Pitt, della pellicola drammatica di Julian Goldberger The Hawk is Dying, e de L’amore giovane (The Hottest State) di Ethan Hawke, che è stato presentato in anteprima ai Festival di Toronto e di Venezia. L’attrice ha anche partecipato a La terra dell’abbondanza (Land of Plenty) di Wim Wenders, presentato in competizione al Festival di Venezia e che si è aggiudicato il premio UNESCO.
Recentemente, ha lavorato alla pellicola di Spike Jonze Where The Wild Things Are, che uscirà nel 2008, e ha partecipato al biopic di Todd Haynes su Bob Dylan intitolato I'm Not There. Ha anche lavorato con Philip Seymour Hoffman in Synecdoche, un film diretto da Charlie Kaufman.
Sul palcoscenico, la Williams ha ottenuto delle ottime recensioni per la sua interpretazione di Varya ne Il giardino dei ciliegi di Cechov al Williamstown Theatre Festival. In precedenza, aveva ottenuto analoghi consensi per il suo lavoro in Smelling a Rat di Mike Leigh al Samuel Beckett Theatre e nel suo esordio off-Broadway in Killer Joe.
Nella filmografia della Williams, ricordiamo anche titoli come Imaginary Heroes di Dan Harris, A Hole in One di Richard Ledes, The Baxter di Michael Showalter, Me Without You di Sandra Goldbacher e Le ragazze della Casa Bianca (Dick) di Andrew Fleming .
In televisione, ha recitato assieme a Chloë Sevigny nell’acclamato film della HBO Women (If These Walls Could Talk 2), diretto da Martha Coolidge. Inoltre, ha interpretato per sei stagioni il ruolo di Jen Lindley nella popolare serie della WB Dawson's Creek, del 1998, che è rimasto uno dei prodotti della WB di maggiore successo.