page_title: Michelle Williams (actress)
section_title: 2006–2010: Work with auteurs
hierarchical_section_title: Michelle Williams (actress) / Life and career / 2006–2010: Work with auteurs
caption_attribution_description: English: American actress Michelle Williams at the premiere of the film Shutter Island at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival.
context_page_description: Michelle Ingrid Williams is an American actress. She is particularly known for her roles in small-scale independent productions with dark or tragic themes. She is the recipient of several accolades, including two Golden Globe Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award, in addition to nominations for four Academy Awards and one Tony Award.
  Born to the politician and trader Larry R. Williams, she was raised in Kalispell and San Diego. She began her career at a young age with television guest appearances and made her film debut in the family film Lassie. At 15, she gained emancipation from her parents, and soon achieved recognition for her leading role in the television teen drama series Dawson's Creek. This was followed by low-profile films, before her breakthrough role in the romantic drama Brokeback Mountain, in which her performance as the wife of a gay man earned Williams her first Academy Award nomination.
  Williams went on to gain critical acclaim for playing emotionally troubled women coping with loss or loneliness in the independent dramas Wendy and Lucy, Blue Valentine, and Manchester by the Sea.
context_section_description: Williams had two film releases in 2006. She first featured opposite Paul Giamatti in the drama The Hawk Is Dying. Five months after giving birth to her daughter, she returned to work on Ethan Hawke's directorial venture The Hottest State, based on his own novel. Leslie Felperin of Variety found her role to be too brief. Following the awards season success of Brokeback Mountain, Williams was unsure of what to do next. After six months of indecision, she agreed to a small part in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There (2007), a musical inspired by the life of Bob Dylan. She was then attracted to the part of an enigmatic seductress named S in the 2008 crime thriller Deception. The film, which co-starred Hugh Jackman and Ewan McGregor, was considered by critics to be middling and predictable. In her next release, Incendiary, based on Chris Cleave's novel of the same name, Williams reteamed with McGregor to play a woman whose family is killed in a terrorist attack. In his review for The Independent, Robert Hanks called it "sloppy", and said that Williams deserved better.
  Williams' two other releases of 2008 were better received. The screenwriter Charlie Kaufman was impressed with her comic timing in Dick and thus cast her in his directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, an ensemble experimental drama headlined by Philip Seymour Hoffman. It was a box office bomb and polarized critics, although Roger Ebert named it the best film of the decade. Two days after finishing work on Synecdoche, New York, Williams began filming Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy, playing the part of a poor and lonesome young woman traveling with her dog and looking for employment. With a shoestring budget of $300,000, the film was shot on location in Portland, Oregon, with a largely volunteer crew. Williams had just separated from Ledger and was relieved for the anonymity the project provided. She was pleased with Reichardt's minimalistic approach and identified with her character's self-sufficiency and fortitude. Sam Adams of Los Angeles Times found Williams' performance to be "remarkable not only for its depth but for its stillness" and Mick LaSalle commended her for effectively conveying a "lived-in sense of always having been close to the economic brink".
  While filming in Sweden for her next project, Mammoth (2009), news broke that Ledger had died from an accidental intoxication from prescription drugs. Although Williams continued filming, she later said, "It was horrible. I don't remember most of it." In her first public statement, a week after Ledger's death, Williams expressed her heartbreak and described Ledger's spirit as surviving in their daughter. Later that month she attended his memorial and funeral services.
  Mammoth was directed by the Swedish director Lukas Moodysson and featured Williams and Gael García Bernal as a couple dealing with issues stemming from globalization. Her role was that of an established surgeon, a part she deemed herself too young to logically play. In the same year she co-starred with Natalie Portman in a Roman Polanski-directed faux perfume commercial called Greed. For her next project, Martin Scorsese cast her opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in the psychological thriller Shutter Island. Based on Dennis Lehane's novel, it featured her as a depressed housewife who drowns her own children. The high-profile production marked a departure for her, and she found it difficult to adjust to the slower pace of filming. In preparation, she read case studies on infanticide. After finishing work on the film in 2008, Williams admitted that playing a series of troubled women coupled with her own personal difficulties had taken an emotional toll on her. She took a year off work to focus on her daughter. Shutter Island was released in 2010 and was a commercial success, grossing over $294 million worldwide.
  Williams first read the script of Derek Cianfrance's romantic drama Blue Valentine at age 21. When funding came through after years of delay, she was reluctant to accept the offer as filming in California would take her away from her daughter for too
caption: Williams at the Berlin International Film Festival for the premiere of Shutter Island in 2010
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