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February 4, 2012MICHELLE Williams has invited me for a picnic dinner in the backyard.
It’s only on loan for the evening, so we can talk about her latest project, My Week with Marilyn, for which she won a Golden Globe and is nominated for the Academy Award for best actress, and in which she brings to life the doomed star whom Norman Mailer once called “the sweet angel of sex”.
I’ve put on my favourite shirt, combed my hair and brought two bottles of chilled rosé, which, like me, are beaded with perspiration. A slight, luminously beautiful girl with very short, very blonde hair, a vintage floral dress and bare feet arrives. “Hi,” she says, smiling. “I’m Michelle.” A few minutes later, we’re sitting in a wall-enclosed garden, talking over glasses of wine in the muggy twilight.
Onscreen, Williams often exudes a bruised, wary fragility, whether as a betrayed wife in Brokeback Mountain or a young mother watching her marriage crumble in Blue Valentine. Today, despite a faint undercurrent of melancholy, she’s bright and animated, quick to laugh.
She gestures with small, expressive hands as the conversation ranges from her affinity for 1930s dresses to the long discontinued Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602 pencils (“I love things that are old and beautiful and tell a story, even if it’s a sad one”).
Williams has been described as guarded in interviews, but her mood now seems relaxed and open. “I feel like something has changed for me, but it’s a new change, so it’s hard for me to describe,” she says. “Maybe it has something to do with turning 30.
"I don’t feel as shy or nervous or self-conscious. I have more confidence that I can handle what life brings me. I don’t feel scared to have an idea and express it. I feel giddy, because it’s a complete transformation. It’s like I’ve found my voice.”
With My Week with Marilyn, the now 31-year-old has also just come off a role that required the biggest transformation of her career. The idea of playing such an iconic figure was daunting. “As soon as I finished the script, I knew I wanted to do it, and then I spent six months trying to talk myself out of it,” she says. “But I knew I never really had a choice. I’ve started to believe you get the piece of material you are ready for.”
Williams spent six months immersing herself in all things Monroe. She read biographies, diaries, letters, poems and notes, pored over photographs, listened to recordings, watched movies and tracked down obscure clips on YouTube. “I’d go to bed every night with a stack of books next to me,” she recalls. “And I’d fall asleep to movies of her. It was like when you were a kid and you’d put a book under your pillow hoping you’d get it by osmosis.”
Her turn from indie waif to Hollywood sex goddess involved working with a choreographer to perfect Monroe’s walk and gaining weight to approximate her curves. “Unfortunately, it went right to my face,” she says, puffing up her cheeks to illustrate.
“So, at some point, it became a question of, do I want my face to look like Marilyn’s, or my hips?” (She opted for the former and filled out the latter with foam padding.) In the end, she says, “it felt like being reborn, like breaking my body and remaking it in her image, learning how she walked and talked and held her head”.
She may have become a star as a blonde teen siren in the TV drama Dawson’s Creek, but since then, despite plenty of onscreen nudity and some graphic scenes, Williams has avoided trading on her sex appeal. “The expectation to be beautiful always makes me feel ugly, because I feel I can’t live up to it,” she explains. “But I do remember one moment of being all suited up as Marilyn and walking from my dressing room onto the soundstage practising my wiggle.
'There were men gathered around a truck, and I remember seeing they were watching me come and feeling they were watching me go - for the first time, I glimpsed some idea of the pleasure I could take in that kind of attention; not their pleasure but my pleasure. And I thought, oh, maybe Marilyn felt that when she walked down the beach.”
Williams’ co-stars were in awe of her daily metamorphosis. Kenneth Branagh (who plays Sir Laurence Olivier) says, “I’d look over and there’s Michelle. Half-an-hour later, Marilyn has arrived but is a bit sleepy.
"Half an hour later and Marilyn is now very frisky. And, finally, just before we’re due to be called onset, Marilyn is fully there - the dress is on, the hair is in place, there’s a glint in the eye.”
In the days after our alfresco dinner, Williams and I exchange emails about where we should continue the conversation. I suggest Far Rockaway, a longtime mecca of seaside frolicking that’s lately become a destination for food-obsessed hipsters. Williams writes, “It sounds like an adventure, and I need one.”
On a sweltering Sunday, I meet her at her three-storey brownstone in Brooklyn, where she lives with her daughter, Matilda. Reminders of Heath Ledger, from whom Williams was separated when he died in 2008, are everywhere: in family photos, in the oversize stuffed animals he bought for Matilda, in the brooding mountainscape by Australian photographer Bill Henson that hangs in the living room.
The most vivid reminder is Matilda herself - a spirited, sunny six-year-old whose face, a felicitous mix of her parents, lights up when Williams walks into the room. “Supermommy!” she shouts, throwing her arms around her waist. “Hiya, Superdaughter,” her mother says, kneeling to kiss her forehead.
Williams tells me they split their time between their place in the country and here, where, she says, “I wanted her to have the warmth and bustle and security of family.” Out on the ivy-covered terrace, I’m introduced to said clan - Williams’ younger sister, Paige, and her husband, Zach, and their friends, Jeremy and Lauren, all of whom live in the house, and Williams’ half-sister Kelley, who’s visiting with her five-year-old son, Evan.
Before we leave, Matilda shows me two new teeth. She giggles when I say they’re the most grown-up-looking teeth I’ve ever seen. Out on the footpath, Williams says, “Is there anything better than making a kid laugh?”
On the crowded train to Rockaway, no one takes much notice of Williams, who’s dressed for the occasion in a vintage red sundress and pink ballet flats. We stroll along the boardwalk among throngs of cool kids eating tacos. She puts on a pair of black Ray-Bans - and not just because it’s sunny. Williams jokes she’d imagined a scene “out of Stardust Memories, with a dilapidated boardwalk and deserted beach”. Suddenly, she seems vulnerable.
However, the hurricane of grief that came with Ledger’s death seems to have passed. “Three years ago, it felt like we didn’t have anything, and now life has kind of repaired itself,” says Williams. “It’s not a perfectly operating system - there are dips and electrical storms - but the basics are intact.”
Still, nothing will ever be the same. “It’s changed how I see the world,” she adds. “It’s changed the parent I am, the friend I am, the kind of work I want to do. It’s become the lens through which I see life - that it’s all impermanent.”
She shuts her eyes, then opens them and says, “For a long time, I couldn’t stop touching people’s faces. I was like, ‘You’re here!’ It all seemed so fleeting; I wanted to hold on to it.”
She speculates she’s drawn to stories about the vicissitudes of love because “relationships have always seemed mysterious, and therefore worth exploring. I’m single, so it’s still kind of a mystery - one I want to be on the scent of.”
She admits she misses having a man around when hauling wood at her house upstate. But, unlike Monroe, she doesn’t define herself through the men in her life: “I’m not lonely, and I think that has to do with what’s on my bedside table, rather than what’s in my bed.”
Williams hasn’t entirely let go of Marilyn. One of the riddles she hasn’t solved is how a creature filled with so much life and joy could also be filled with so much misery and pain.
“Her deepest desire was to be taken seriously as an actor, but she doesn’t shine in her serious roles. Where she happens to shine is in comedy and in song and dance, but she essentially said, ‘It’s not what I’m good at.’ She didn’t know it, but she clearly was incandescent.”
My Week with Marilyn is in cinemas February 16.
