Those of you with a GQ magazine subscription will already know this, but gracing the cover of the February issue is Michelle Williams and boy has she come a long way since she first came to our attention, playing Dawson Creek’s Jen Lindley almost 15 years ago.
Back then, she was just another teenage actress in an angst-filled teen drama but now she’s one of the most highly respected yet understated actresses in Hollywood and her most recent role as Marilyn Monroe blew critics away.
But it hasn’t been an easy ride and in her interview in GQ, she talks about her struggles - emancipating herself from her parents at the age of 15, trying to find her way on her own and, of course, losing Heath Ledger, the father of her daughter, back in 2008.
The turning point in her career was undoubtedly when she filmed Brokeback Mountain, the film on which she met Ledger. Suddenly the audience stopped seeing her as the girl from Dawson’s Creek and realised she was actually a pretty good actress.
Since then she has gone on to make other films such as Blue Valentine and My Week with Marilyn, however the film she is currently working on is not something to win her critical acclaim, it’s simply something her daughter would enjoy – Disney’s prequel to the Wizard of Oz, Oz the Great and Powerful, directed by Sam Raimi.
Her shoot for the interview sees her taking up her role as Marilyn once again. She talks about how she prepared to play Marilyn and the advice that she got from fellow actor, Philip Seymour-Hoffman after she told him who she’d be playing. “His advice," she says, "was: 'If there's even a whiff of the icon, things get much less interesting.’” She clearly took the advice as Williams nailed Monroe perfectly without looking like she was trying to be THE Marilyn Monroe.
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Posted by Andrew Burge.
