Michelle Williams (actress)

Michelle Williams (actress)

Michelle Ingrid Williams (born September 9, 1980) is an American actress. After starting her career with television guest appearances in the early 1990s, Williams achieved recognition for her role as Jen Lindley on the The WB television teen drama Dawson's Creek, which she played from 1998 to 2003. Williams graduated to full-length features, including Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998), her first mainstream film; Dick (1999), a comedy and Prozac Nation (2001).

From the 2000s, Williams appeared primarily in dramatic, independent films for which she has received critical acclaim. Her career highlight was Brokeback Mountain (2005), a movie about a male-male relationship in the 1960s, which earned Williams a Best Supporting Actress nomination from the Academy Awards for her role as the wife of one of the men. She followed this with I'm Not There (2007), Synecdoche, New York (2008) and Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island (2010). Williams's performance as a drifter in 2008's Wendy and Lucy earned her critical praise and her work opposite Ryan Gosling in Blue Valentine (2010) garnered her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn (2011), which also garnered her third Academy Award nomination and her second nomination for Best Actress. She is scheduled to appear next in 2013's Oz: The Great and Powerful.

Williams had a relationship with the late actor Heath Ledger, her Brokeback Mountain co-star. They had a daughter, Matilda, before separating in 2007.