When Hollywood legend Michelle Williams appears on my Zoom with her trademark platinum crop, I find myself awkwardly apologising because the Bafta nominations have just been announced, and the film she’s flown over to promote – Steven Spielberg’s beautiful memoir, The Fabelmans – has been almost entirely’snubbed’.
‘It’s quite all right,’ she says. ‘We are blessed in many other ways.’
That’s correct. The Fabelmans has been nominated for best picture and best director at the Oscars, and Williams has been nominated for best actress for the sixth time. The film also won best drama film and best director at the Golden Globes, where Williams was nominated again. So, does she believe that 2023 will be her year?
‘I feel like as long as I’m working, it’s always my year,’ she says. ‘I’ve been doing this for 30 years, since I was 12 years old. I’ve been acting my entire life. And there were so many years when I wasn’t making the kind of work that I wanted to. So anything good that comes my way is only received with joy and relief.’
It’s been a long road since her Baywatch debut as The Hoff’s son’s preteen obsession (aged 12). However, Williams has always aspired to be a serious actor. She was typecast as the ‘bad girl’ on TV show Dawson’s Creek after receiving emancipated from her parents at the age of 15, supposedly ‘to get around child labour rules’ (she has refused to discuss further) (1998-2003).
Then, in the Oscar-winning film Brokeback Mountain (2005), she met the late Heath Ledger (with whom she had her first child) and her life – and career choices – were forever altered.
Because, in a world where Hollywood jobs influence family fortunes, this 42-year-old actress has consistently prioritised her own children. Even acting as Glinda the Good in Oz: The Great and Powerful, “which I adored producing for my daughter when she was eight years old,” she says.
With motherhood being Williams’s most significant role, it’s hardly a wonder she liked playing Mitzi (a version of Spielberg’s mother) in The Fabelmans, because of her ‘energy, vitality, ability for humour and joy’.
What aspects of Mitzi would she like to bring into her own life?
‘The refusal to spend any time doing the dishes,’ she jokes. Leah Spielberg, Spielberg’s mother, was a classical pianist who ordered the family dine on disposable plates so she wouldn’t destroy her hands washing up.
Williams nearly turned down her Oscar-nominated role in Blue Valentine in 2010 because she’d promised her daughter, Matilda, that she’d always be present to pick her up from school — until director Derek Cianfrance relocated the entire production to make it possible.
Since then, Williams has married and divorced and now has two children via her second husband, theatre director Thomas Kail, who she met while shooting TV show Fosse/Verdon. Does she, like Mitzi, feel the conflicting tugs of her art and her family?
‘It’s definitely harder, the more children that you have!’ she says. ‘I haven’t worked since I made Steven’s movie but that work is what makes me.’
It all comes down to the kids in the end. ‘I still have the dress hanging in my wardrobe,’ she says of the legendary saffron-yellow Vera Wang gown from 2006, which is regarded as one of the finest all-time Oscar gowns. I’m hoping that one of my children will wear it one day.’
Ask Williams about her ‘wild’ childhood, and she says, ‘I grew up in Montana and there are certain aspects of my childhood that come back to me as being profoundly important and that I hope to pass on to my children. A connection to nature, the ability to walk outside and feel at home in the world.’
With a teenager, a toddler, and a baby to care for, Williams admits she has yet to commit to a new endeavour.
‘My little one is so little that home is really where I want to be right now.’
The Fabelmans is out Friday in cinemas
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