Here is what happens in this article: I meet with Michelle Williams on three days in two different cities over a bit more than a week. Much does not go as either of us expects. On the first day, we mainly talk about her youth, and I make her cry. On the second, we mainly talk about her becoming Marilyn Monroe. This is the only dry-eyed meeting. (Unless—quite possible—I was too insensitive to notice.) On the third, we mainly talk about her life with, and without, Heath Ledger. At the end of the third day, we walk around a park in the dark. At the end of the second day, we tidy up the leftovers of her daughter's birthday cupcakes. At the end of the first day, she leaves in tears, her parting words: "That was really awful."
That's about all. There's also a moment at the very end of the article that could be taken as an atmospheric, ambivalent allegory about the chasing of dreams, but is probably just a brief account of a long hike. The rest is taken up with all that kind of stuff that people sometimes say when they're asked enough questions. If any of it breaks your heart, it was probably already a little broken to begin with.
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On that first day, we meet at the Oakwood apartments in Los Angeles. This extensive residential compound is a legendary staging post for aspiring actors—indeed for anyone trying to get a foothold in the city. It is also where Michelle Williams used to stay in her early teens, long beforeDawson's Creek, let alone her subsequent stealthy rise through an interesting mess of movies, whose inevitable misfires never seemed to be hers, until she emerged as one of the great unshowy talents of her generation. Meeting here was my suggestion. No great reason. In everything I'd read about her, this was the only place in Los Angeles that seemed even slightly significant. (She's lived in Brooklyn for many years.) Though she phones me when she's on her way, wondering if we should change the plan because it's raining and she is wearing thin ballet-style shoes, I'm already there and can't think of an easy alternative. When she arrives—it's just after nine in the morning—she leaves her car (she has a driver), climbs into mine, and I slowly drive round the apartment's parking lot while we work out what to do.
"This is crazy," she says. "Why did I agree to this?"
She tells me that she hasn't been back here for fifteen years. When she first decided that she wanted to be an actress, at the age of 11 or 12, her parents would drive her up from their San Diego home to Los Angeles for auditions and, eventually, for jobs. By 15 she would become legally emancipated and have her own apartment in the Valley, but before that she'd stay here off and on, usually with her mother. "Such a strange place to revisit," she says.
I park and we take shelter from the rain in a covered outdoor stairway. Williams can't even quite recall which apartment was once hers, but some memories begin to trickle back. First, the decor. "I ­remember there was a lot of teal and pink," she says. Then the inhabitants. "I wonder if the people I remember still live here." She pulls a name from her memory. "Devin Oatway. I kind of want to go to the front desk and ask if his parents are still here." She won't, of course. "Oh, I had such a crush on him," she says. "He gave me Thus Spake Zarathustra."
So, even then, she was the kind of girl whose pulse privately quickened for Nietzsche? It's sensible to be wary of such details, and wonder whether they're just a typical affectation of a young actor straining for seriousness, but for Williams it all seems to come from somewhere inside her that was established early and deeply. "My dad gave me Notes from the Underground when I was 12," she explains, and here and now, sitting on a step of the building where she used to read such books, she quietly recites to me the opening of Dostoevsky's nihilistic landmark: "I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man...."
Clearly, I observe, she was quite drawn toward the dark.
"I was, yeah. Aren't most teenagers?"
No, I say. Lots, but not most. Otherwise there'd be no sports.
She considers this, agrees that it might be true. "Maybe when I was in my early twenties and my late teens, I was more prone to sitting in it or lacerating myself with it," she says. "Now I want to move out of it. I have a daughter. I want a happy life."
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She is discussing her education, and how she ended up being home-schooled and doing correspondence courses—a better fit with her acting work, and a way to sidestep the unwanted bother she'd begun to face at school. "There's plenty of opportunities to tease someone who's been in a Lassie movie." Her last formal school was Santa Fe Christian in San Diego; later its principal would denounce Williams after she appeared in Brokeback Mountain. ("Michelle doesn't represent the values of this institution," he said. "She made the kinds of choices of which we wouldn't approve.") "It didn't really bother me," she says, when I allude to this.
No twinge, I ask, when you suddenly found out that you'd been living a sinful, artistic career?
"It wasn't any surprise to me," she says. "I knew. I remember my mother saying to me at one point, 'Just don't make anything your grandmother couldn't see.' And at that point I knew I was living a sinful artistic career, because I had done, and I knew I would do."
So I ask her what the first thing was that really stepped over that line, and that's when she starts telling me about this New York play. It was called Killer Joe. In it, there was copious violence and rough, raw emotion, within which, each night, she was required to take off all her clothes. She was 18 and on break from Dawson's Creek. That summer she'd had two offers—to make a lot of money in a film about cheerleaders with guns, or to make next to nothing and face the discomforts of Killer Joe. For a girl determined to prove which path she was on, it was an easy decision. "That play, I see it as a direct link from there to where I am now."
And that's when I ask the first question that seems to derail her. When I say it, I have no idea that it'll be a big deal. It's not even really a question—I just mention something she said in one of her early interviews: that after her parents came to see the play, she had to go and find a therapist.
But when I say this, she looks at me in the way you look when you're sort of shocked and hurt and feel invaded; when you're determined to show none of this but know it will be a losing battle.
"Oh God," she says. "Wow. I mean, I must have said that twelve years ago, before I learned to shut my mouth. Wow." Then, less to me than to herself: "All right, I can take it. I'm 31—I can take it."
Hesitantly, she agrees to fill in a few details. "They weren't fans of that play. It was like [an] alien invasion or something in our normal lives where there weren't artists—they hadn't seen anything like it." To make it worse, her parents didn't even tell her they were coming—she didn't know they were there until they surprised her afterward, backstage. "I think I was having a beer. I haven't asked them about that for a long time. We don't bring that one up."
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When Williams legally emancipated herself from her parents at 15, she didn't do so because of any family schism, but for the independence and the practical advantages—she says she no longer needed a tutor and could work adult hours. When I suggest that it was pretty ambitious and self-contained to think she could handle it, she agrees. "It was just stupid. I didn't know what I was taking on," she says. "I don't think things through very often—I don't project into the future about how a situation will turn out. Even the simplest things, I'm guilty of making really bad decisions a lot of the time. In my work it's a capacity that's served me well, but in my life it can be a problem."
She describes being "a 15-year-old making a house as best as she could. I had an egg crate for a mattress. It's hard to tuck your sheets under an egg crate." It was, she says, "very, very lonely." She also refers to "just being around not-great people"; there were clearly experiences difficult enough that she would prefer to keep the details to herself.