There’s no denying, Michelle Williams is smokingly beautiful. The actress covers the February issue of GQ magazine and even opens up about her childhood, catching the acting bug, and the deceased actor and father of her daughter Matilda, Heath Ledger.
Williams is also nominated for two Oscar awards for her role in current film. My Week With Marilyn. Here’s a bit of what she had to say.
Williams on her education and how she ended up being home-schooled (a better fit with her acting work):
Her last formal school was Santa Fe Christian in San Diego; later its principal would denounce Williams after she appeared in Brokeback Mountain. (“Michelle doesn’t represent the values of this institution,” he said. “She made the kinds of choices of which we wouldn’t approve.”) “It didn’t really bother me,” she says, when I allude to this.
No twinge, I ask, when you suddenly found out that you’d been living a sinful, artistic career?
“It wasn’t any surprise to me,” she says. “I knew. I remember my mother saying to me at one point, ‘Just don’t make anything your grandmother couldn’t see.’ And at that point I knew I was living a sinful artistic career, because I had done, and I knew I would do.”
…on how the role that first made her famous—the Dawson’s Creek bad girl Jen—still somewhat played into regular sexy-girl stereotypes, only made her swerve in the opposite direction with all the more resolve.
“I wouldn’t say that that would be one of my first qualities as a human being—being sexy,” Williams reasons. “And I think because my character on Dawson’s Creek was sexy…sexualized…sexual…I saw all the negative attention and connotations that can come along with that. And that those things can keep people from seeing you clearly.”
…on why she thinks her and Heath Ledger were drawn to each other:
“There’s an answer that I know,” she says, “but I don’t want to say.” She talks around this not-saying for a while, then says, “Our initial meeting, the circumstances of how we first met, were cosmic or something.” They were together through the shoot, and soon she was pregnant. “Yeah, a lot of things happened at once,” she says. “It’s a bit like: We had a lot of things to do, because we didn’t have a lot of time, or something.”
On whether she thought there was a part of her that imagined she and Ledger would have somehow ended up together:
“That would make me way too sad to answer,” she says quickly, and I hurriedly begin another question, about something completely different, hoping that if I say it fast enough these new words will chase the old words away from where they are hanging in the air between us, and maybe she will let me pretend that it was something I never said.“No, no,” she says, and I can see the tears forming, and I think she means that she doesn’t want to answer any more questions about anything. I mutter some kind of apology under my breath.
But, even now, I’m wrong about everything. Mostly she is just trying to stop my new question. She has something to tell me.“No,” she says. “I said it would make me too sad to answer but it’s also…”—and she nods even as her voice breaks once more with tears—“…one of my favorite things to imagine.” And through the tears, a beaming, almost beatific smile stretches room-wide across her face. “It’s actually one of my favorite places to visit.”
(Source: GQ/Global Grind)
