Entertainment
Michelle Williams on why parenthood is her greatest role and playing Steven Spielberg’s mother-Larushka Ivan-Zadeh-Entertainment – Metro
‘My little one is so little that home is really where I want to be right now.’
Michelle Williams is in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans (Picture: Steve Granitz/FilmMagic)
When Hollywood treasure Michelle Williams flashes up on my Zoom with her trademark platinum crop, I find myself apologising awkwardly because the Bafta nominations have just been announced and the film she’s flown over to promote – Steven Spielberg’s beautiful memoir, The Fabelmans – was almost totally ‘snubbed’.
‘It’s quite all right,’ she says. ‘We are blessed in many other ways.’
Well, quite. The Fabelmans has now been nominated for best picture and best director at the Oscars and Williams for best actress – her fifth nomination. The film has also scooped best drama film and best director at the Golden Globes, again where Williams was also nominated. So, does she feel like 2023 is finally 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 journey from her screen debut in Baywatch, as the tween crush of The Hoff’s son (aged 12). But Williams has always burned to be a serious actor. After gaining emancipation from her parents, aged 15, apparently ‘to get around child labour laws’ (she’s refused to comment further) she got typecast as the ‘bad girl’ on TV show Dawson’s Creek (1998-2003).
Then a breakthrough role in the Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain (2005) collided her with the late Heath Ledger (with whom she had her first child) and changed her life – and career choices.
Michelle made her screen debut in Baywatch aged just 12 (Picture: Supplied)
Because in a world where Hollywood roles dictate family fortunes, this 42-year-old actress has firmly put her own kids first. Even to the point of playing Glinda the Good in Oz: The Great And Powerful, ‘which I loved making for my daughter when she was eight years old’.
With motherhood being Williams’s most important role, it’s hardly a surprise she adored playing Mitzi (a version of Spielberg’s mother) in The Fabelmans, because of her ‘energy, vitality, capacity for humour and joy’.
What, specifically, of Mitzi would she wish to incorporate in her own life?
(L-R) Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano), younger Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord) and Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams) in The Fabelmans (Picture: Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal)
‘The refusal to spend any time doing the dishes,’ she jokes. Spielberg’s mother, Leah, was a classical pianist who made the family eat off disposable plates lest she ruin her hands washing up.
Williams almost turned down her Oscar-nominated role in 2010’s Blue Valentine because she’d promised her daughter, Matilda, that she’d always be there to pick her up from school – until director Derek Cianfrance relocated the entire production to enable that.
Michelle in a scene from The Fabelmans, in which she plays Mitzi (Picture: LMKMEDIA)
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.’
In the end, it all boils down to the kids. Ask her about the famous saffron-yellow Vera Wang dress from 2006 – ranked as one of the greatest all-time Oscar frocks – and she says: ‘I still have the dress hanging in my closet. Hopefully, 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.’
More: film
Now with a teenager, a toddler and an infant to juggle, Williams reveals she’s yet to sign up to any new project.
‘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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