MICHELLE WILLIAMS Biography - Actors and Actresses

 
 

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MICHELLE WILLIAMS

Name: Michelle Ingrid Williams                                                         
Born: 9 September 1980 Kalispell, Montana, United States                               
                                                                                       
Michelle Ingrid Williams (born September 9, 1980) is an Academy Award-nominated       
American actress. Williams broke into stardom on the teen series Dawson's Creek       
and later graduated to full-length features, such as Brokeback Mountain, for           
which she earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.                     
                                                                                       
Williams, the eldest of five children, was born in Kalispell, Montana, the             
daughter of Carla, a homemaker, and Larry Williams, a well-known stock and             
commodities trader currently living in Australia, while fighting extradition to       
the United States on allegations of U.S. Federal Income Tax evasion which he           
disputes.                                                                             
                                                                                       
When Williams was nine, her family moved to San Diego, California, and, at an         
early age, she became interested in acting. At age fifteen, faced with her             
parents' disapproval, she emancipated herself from them and, after completing         
the ninth grade at the Upper School of Santa Fe Christian Schools, in Solana           
Beach, California, she left school in order to pursue her acting career in             
Dawson's Creek.                                                                       
                                                                                       
In 1997, at age sixteen, she won the Robbins World Cup Trading Championship, as       
her father had done ten years earlier. She turned $10,000 into $110,000 over           
the course of a year and that gain (as of 2006) is the fourth highest in the           
history of that competition (her father's being the highest).                         
                                                                                       
Williams's career began in television, appearing in programs such as the 1990's       
version of Lassie, Baywatch, and Home Improvement. Williams' first film role was       
in the motion picture Species. Soon after, she won additional roles, including         
the Jessica Lange-Michelle Pfeiffer film A Thousand Acres and the 1998 movie           
Halloween: H20. Williams's star profile rose considerably when in 1998, she was       
cast as one of the lead characters on the WB show Dawson's Creek. She would play       
Jen Lindley for all six seasons of the successful show.                               
                                                                                       
During and after Dawson's Creek's run, Williams made strong turns in several           
notable indie films. Her first starring role was as Arlene in the film Dick, a         
satire of the Watergate scandal, opposite Kirsten Dunst. She starred opposite         
Christina Ricci in Prozac Nation, and also appeared in the HBO film If These           
Walls Could Talk 2, and several acclaimed indie pictures such as The United           
States of Leland, Me Without You, and Imaginary Heroes with Sigourney Weaver.         
For her performance in The Station Agent, Williams along with the rest of the         
cast received a Screen Actors Guild award nomination for Best Acting Ensemble.         
In 2005, critics and audiences took note of Williams's performance in Ang Lee's       
Brokeback Mountain. For her performance, she won a Critic's Choice Award and           
received Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting       
Actress.                                                                               
                                                                                       
Since then, Williams has been cast in several highly anticipated films. In 2006,       
she appeared in The Hawk Is Dying, with Paul Giamatti; and in 2007, in The             
Hottest State, opposite Ethan Hawke, and in I'm Not There, directed by Todd           
Haynes, which also features Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and           
Julianne Moore, among others.