NEW YORK – It's unduly frigid in her Waldorf-Astoria hotel suite, so Michelle Williams, clad in a black minidress, cranks up the heat by channeling her inner vixen."Want to get under the covers with me?" she purrs, raising her eyebrows and wrapping a fuzzy blanket around her bare legs as she snuggles on a couch.
How very Marilyn Monroe of her. And Williams, with a wink and a grin, knows it. If early word of mouth is any indication, the actress will be sashaying her way to an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Hollywood's platinum-haired stunner in My Week with Marilyn, opening Nov. 23. In the film, about the making of Monroe's 1957 romp The Prince and the Showgirl, Williams plays three characters: the privately neurotic, strung-out Monroe; the delightful, lighthearted, sexpot persona the actress adopted in public; and the adorkable character Monroe plays in the movie.
Embodying three versions of one indelibly iconic woman was, says Williams, "the hardest thing I've ever done. Most days it was an act of courage to stay on set, stay in the chair, and not flee."
Unlike Monroe, Williams, 31, isn't anxious or insecure about her work. Nor is she a tortured artiste who agonizes over every nuance. Yet she doesn't go easy on herself either. When told of the early accolades her performance is getting, Williams scrunches up her face. "So, what do you think?" she asks. "What doesn't work? I keep thinking about the bad things."
Williams left little to chance when prepping to play Monroe, a woman who appeared in some 30 films yet whose allure far outlasted her short career and lived on after her mysterious 1962 death. Williams watched Monroe's films. She listened to her sing. She began quietly, tentatively adopting the breathy voice, the specific hand movements, the come-hither walk.
"I just tried to make her presence gradually and unobtrusively fill my life and my house. I tried to build it, so it didn't feel like work or study that I had to do, just a slow seeping in. I started to try and mimic what I saw and what I heard privately in my house, and I started to take that a little bit out in the world, try something in the post office or the grocery store," she says.
Her methods worked, reports Kenneth Branagh. He plays Laurence Olivier, the prince to Monroe's showgirl. "The one way Michelle Williams did not embody Marilyn Monroe was that she showed up on time. Everything else, she seemed to get Marilyn," he says.
Indeed, early on, Williams shot the scene in which Monroe arrives at Pinewood Studios in London and meets her somewhat aloof British co-stars. As Williams plays her, the real Monroe was terrified and overcome with insecurity and fear of imminent failure, and raced out of the room. Williams, on the other hand, "was poised," says Branagh. " Michelle came up and said hello to everybody. She was neither overconfident nor overawed. She was somehow real. You were immediately aware that there was a genuine and true quality to her. Simplicity is a very hard thing to achieve in life or in art, and she has it."
Why Monroe?
Williams still isn't sure, despite her research, what exactly made Monroe such a monumental, mythical, eternally glamorous presence. Today, thanks to the advent of camera phones and the Internet, you'd likely have photos of Monroe drunkenly exiting a bar. Instead, she lives on as an embodiment of timeless, bleached, curvy perfection.
"When I first started researching it, I kind of naively assumed that that was Marilyn Monroe. It was a very carefully constructed persona that she put on. It was an absolute fabrication. Everyone said she had quite an average walk and quite an average voice. It was something she turned on at will. I still wonder about it. What captures people's interest about her?"
As for the fawning, unhinged hysteria that accompanied Monroe when she was out in public? Williams, who lives in Brooklyn with daughter Matilda, 6, can't even begin to relate, or understand, what Monroe's life must have been like.
"I don't think I have that problem. I don't know what you'd call it. She was beloved. That's unlike anything I'll ever know," says Williams with a laugh.
She got an unwelcome taste of it three years ago following the January 2008 overdose death of her former boyfriend, and Matilda's father, Heath Ledger. Before, during, and after, Williams mostly kept her head down, making small films and raising her child. Things have settled down, but sometimes, Williams wonders what her life would be had she not become a nomadic actress.
"Do you ever play that game with yourself, 'What if?' What's your parallel life like? I don't really do a lot in my parallel life. I'm not very productive. I mostly just have kids and sew and read books," she says.
There's something charmingly contemplative and honest about Williams. And despite her proclivity for heavy roles in dramas such as Blue Valentine and Wendy and Lucy, there's an ease and lightness to her.
"She's a proper serious artist, but she's naughty and twinkly and giggly. She likes a bit of a laugh," says Branagh. "She is interested in other people. She doesn't make it all about her. She has vitality. She's jolly good company, upbeat and fun. I felt that she put me at my ease."
She likes a low-key life
Williams isn't a workaholic. Nor is she particularly driven. In a perfect world, Williams would shoot one or two films a year, ideally during her daughter's summer vacation, and spend the remainder of the year at home with Matilda
"I'm not an ambitious person, but I do like a challenge. I go back and forth on it a lot, a lot. I think — I could be wrong — that I'd be just as happy being married and having a bunch of kids. I'd love more kids. But that's not what my life is right now," she says with a shrug.
Instead, Williams has found herself ensconced in Detroit for the rest of the year, shooting Sam Raimi's fable Oz: The Great and Powerful. She's Glinda, the good witch, a fact that has impressed her daughter.
"It's a dream come true for both of us. It's a magical world. She comes every day after school. Big beautiful sets. Amazing costumes. Magical apparatus. Apparati? Wands and flying," says Williams.
Raimi says there's a reason why Williams is so bewitching: "I needed a combination of a good soul and a great actress. She's very quick with a smile. It makes you feel special to be with her. She's very warm."
Williams is gamine and slightly ethereal, all wide eyes and blond pixie locks, but there's also a resolve to her. Given that most former Dawson's Creek upstarts don't end up on Oscar shortlists, her success is no accident. And while she's collaborative, she won't let you push her around.
"She is a very wonderful hybrid of a strong human being while also having a fragility that gives her an almost skinless quality and lets audiences see into her thoughts. In life she has that same strength and absolute knowledge of what she wants," says Eddie Redmayne, who plays her young paramour in Marilyn.
And what she doesn't. Her greatest achievement has been giving Matilda a relatively normal childhood. Williams will tell you ample stories, off the record, about Matilda's achievements in school and her little quirks. As long as you promise to keep them private.
"That's where my biggest effort goes — raising her to be a happy kid who's a face among many, who's allowed a right to her face, her individuality, her anonymity," says Williams.
Monroe floundered when it came to negotiating her public and private lives. Williams, too, grapples with fame, though in a far less destructive way.
"I think I'm a pretty transparent person. I don't feel particularly guarded. I want people to have an accurate, honest perception of who I am. I don't know why that matters to me, but it does. But that runs contrary to the fact that people enjoy your work more when they know less. I'm always struggling between those two polarities," she says.
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