From teen TV to Blue Valentine:

the winningly gloomy movie career of Michelle Williams

Her co-star reckons she's 'a cross between Brigitte Bardot and Clint Eastwood'. Not bad for a former star of Dawson's Creek

• Jonathan Bernstein
• The Guardian, Saturday 8 January 2011
• Article history



Michelle Williams, stasr of Blue Valentine. Photograph: Carlo Allegri/AP/Press Association Images

In its 11-year lifespan, America's teen network The WB was a highly visible training ground for a vast army of young actors. But the unblemished skin and wounded stares that can make a young star irresistible to adolescent audiences don't always guarantee a long and fulfilling career. The ensembles of such WB staples as Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Felicity, 7th Heaven, Gilmore Girls and Charmed experienced variable fortunes in their quests to be accepted as non-angsty adults. Some actors – Jessica Biel, Keri Russell and David Boreanaz among them – made smooth and successful transitions. Others less so.

1. Blue Valentine
2. Production year: 2010
3. Country: USA
4. Cert (UK): 15
5. Runtime: 114 mins
6. Directors: Derek Cianfrance
7. Cast: Faith Wladyka, Michelle Williams, Ryan Gosling
8. More on this film

But no WB graduate has put as much distance between themselves and their small-screen origins as Michelle Williams. Sorry, make that creatively daring, critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated Michelle Williams. Or, as Ryan Gosling her co-star in the new rise-and-fall-of-a-relationship movie Blue Valentine puts it, "She's a cross between Brigitte Bardot and Clint Eastwood."

Eighteen-year-old Montana native Williams made a big splash in the formative days of super-articulate teen soap Dawson's Creek. Her character Jen Lindley was a jaded-but-virginal New York transplant hellbent on shaking up her new small-town home with her short skirts, her atheism and her tendency to say things like, "I was sexualised at an early age." The show's writers gradually fell out of love with Jen Lindley, marginalising her to the extent that Williams didn't even feature in posters for latter seasons. "It was kind of being like a mobster," Williams has said of her time on the Creek. "You set up a shop selling pizza but in the back you're laundering money. You're doing one thing in plain sight and secretly plotting something else. I was plotting my beliefs and hopes for what I could be."

'I'd love to do something a bit more light hearted but not inane'

Photograph: Carlo Allegri/AP/Press Association Images

While she endured the prerequisite running, screaming and bleeding in Halloween H20, Williams gave the first indications that she was being under-utilised by the WB in 1999's Dick. The film, about two high-school girls who become dog-walkers and close confidantes of Richard Nixon failed to attract the intended audience of teenage Watergate obsessives but it revealed Williams to be an able comedian capable of convincingly serenading a photo of Nixon with a heart-rending performance of Olivia Newton-John's I Honestly Love You. Before Jen Lindley breathed her last in 2003, Williams would do a stint off-Broadway in Tracy Letts's play Killer Joe, pull off an acceptable English accent in Me Without You, and fight her feelings for Chloë Sevigny in HBO's If These Walls Could Talk 2.

But it wasn't until she played Alma, unsuspecting wife of Heath Ledger's tormented Ennis in Brokeback Mountain that Williams showed she could crush audiences' hearts without a single word. "I relate to it," she said of the part. "I've had that feeling of sort of choking yourself." Williams received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her work in Brokeback Mountain. She also became part of a high-profile couple with Ledger, and a reluctant tabloid fixture. But none of that got in the way of her single-minded pursuit of amassing as gloomy a filmography as she could manage. She was a grieving, adulterous, grief-stricken, vengeful, hallucinating terror victim in the London-based Incendiary. She played a baffled, miscast actress marooned in Philip Seymour Hoffman's never-ending play in Charlie Kaufman's never-ending Synecdoche, New York. She slumped wordlessly through the dusty back alleys of Oregon in search of her lost dog in Wendy And Lucy. And last year, she haunted Leonardo DiCaprio's fevered subconscious in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. "I'd love to do something a bit more light hearted but not inane," Williams has confessed.

The largely improvised Blue Valentine doesn't quite fit that description. A non-linear chronicle of a relationship as it withers from blissful to toxic, the film, which has to date garnered Williams both Independent Spirit and Golden Globe Best Actress nominations, gives her the opportunity to do more than mope. A lot more, in fact. At one point, Gosling and Williams's characters Dean and Cindy get into a screaming fight that boils over into sex scenes angry and raw enough to earn the movie the dreaded NC-17 rating, a stigma removed only after strenuous canvassing and histrionics on the part of Harvey Weinstein. During the course of the couple's rancourous voyage, Williams also tap dances and gains 15 non-prosthetic pounds.

A presumably less combustible pairing with Seth Rogen in the comedy Take This Waltz and an attempt to don the fragile mantle of Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn will follow. It's only seven years since the demise of Dawson's Creek but Michelle Williams has come so far she makes it seem like a lifetime.