Actress Michelle Williams, playing Marilyn Monroe, is shown in a scene from director Simon Curtis' new film "My Week With Marilyn" in this undated publicity handout. (Photo: China Daily)
The connection between Michelle Williams' acting and her personal life is so strong that even she gets the two confused sometimes.
Making last year's "Blue Valentine," which painfully and intimately depicted the collapse of a young marriage, occasionally seems so intense of a memory to Williams as to be a true one.
"When I look back on my life and I sort of reflect on relationships or anything, my mind folds that one into the mix of the real relationships that I've had in my life," says the actress. "And I have to stop myself and say, 'Oh, no, you did not marry and divorce Ryan Gosling.'"
While delusions of wedding Ryan Gosling aren't necessarily uncommon to moviegoers, for Williams they exemplify the intensely introspective approach she takes to her work.
Going by her latest film, "My Week With Marilyn," it's clear Williams has undergone a shift. After years of predominantly raw, naturalistic films like "Wendy and Lucy" and "Blue Valentine," in "My Week With Marilyn," she's glamorous and radiant. That, too, is telling of an interior change in Williams.
"One thing that I've struggled with, been interested in just as a person, a girl-slash-woman, whatever I am at 31 in this world, is being comfortable with myself," Williams says. "I've just spent a lot of time getting to know that person and getting to like that person, so I haven't wanted to lose touch with that person through lenses like hair and make-up and clothes."
Yet "Marilyn," which opens Nov. 23, is drawing Williams some of the best reviews of her career, and has put her squarely in the running for a best actress Academy Award. Williams' performance somehow manages to evoke a fully-fleshed person, well beyond mere caricature. It's a layered rendering of Monroe: a public, glorious Marilyn; a private and vulnerable actress; and the song-and-dance showgirl of "The Prince and the Showgirl."
The film chronicles the production of that 1957 film, which Laurence Olivier directed and co-starred in with Monroe. The two clashed: an oil and water mix of classical British theater and American movie stardom.
"There's technically an enormous challenge, which (Williams) meets lightly, effortlessly," says Kenneth Branagh, who plays Olivier. "Then she puts that all away to one side, doesn't show off to the audience about it. ... She doesn't indulge in playing Marilyn, she just is. It required her to work enormously hard and then hide all the work."
In a recent interview over afternoon tea at a Manhattan hotel, Williams is refreshingly candid. She's dressed elegantly but simply in a black and white dress and wearing a short, blonde pixie haircut that she has said is a tribute to Heath Ledger— her former partner and father to her 6-year-old daughter, Matilda — who liked cropped hair.
Williams would have more reason than most to be guarded, but she answers questions warmly and pensively. When Ledger died in 2008 (a few months after he and Williams separated), an onslaught of media attention landed on Williams, who has since often been hounded by paparazzi. It's an experience that frequently hovers just outside Williams' words, an unspoken tumult.
Williams was born in a small town in northwest Montana. Though her family moved to San Diego when she was 9, Williams believes Montana "formed me in some fundamental way" and that, although she lives in a townhouse in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn, she "will always feel most at home in nature."
