A class act

Take this year’s Blue Valentine, a gruelling account of marital decay, in which she played an intractable young bride whose patience with her husband has expired. (It earned Williams her second Oscar nomination.) Or the forthcoming My Week with Marilyn, which will see her as cinema’s ultimate icon of doomed glamour, in a story set during the fraught making of The Prince and the Showgirl. The physical resemblance to Monroe in early stills from the picture is uncanny, but it takes a special kind of fearlessness or resolve to accept such a loaded role. “I do feel that a real ease and comfort with myself set in at 30,” she confirms. 'Everything takes me more time than it takes other people. A 30-minute recipe for working mums takes me two hours'

In person, there is a gently assertive quality to Williams, first glimpsed when she shepherds me from the table where I’ve been waiting for her to a more secluded post at the dimly lit rear of the room. That way, we won’t risk being overheard, she assures me. That way, we won’t easily be seen. Williams, you realise, has a thing about invisibility. It may even be the defining struggle of her life and career: how to give everything in her art without sacrificing her privacy. “I was folding my laundry the other night,” she says, “and I thought how refreshing it was to be doing something that wasn’t being held up for examination. Nobody was saying, ‘Gee, your whites aren’t very white. What do you add to make your colours stay brighter longer?’”

Perhaps that’s why she has adopted a look that has about it a whiff of disguise: with her feathery platinum crop and black-and-white striped T-shirt, worn under a khaki jacket, she would come first in a Jean Seberg look­alike contest, but fourth or fifth in a Michelle Williams one. Her face is pale and round and tiny, like a misted-over moon, but that fragility is offset by her unforced humour: she laughs easily and often, and will comically rebuke herself in the third person (“That’s a little dramatic, Michelle”) when she has fallen prey to exaggeration.

Her insistence on eye contact also gives the lie to the idea that she’s a shrinking violet. And it’s precisely this ability to suggest simultaneously the delicate and the robust that lies at the heart of her finest work. Think of Brokeback Mountain, where her mutely panicked reaction shot on witnessing her husband’s infidelity with another man provided that movie with its heftiest emotional wallop. She prepared for the scene by contemplating water: “The quality of water, you know? That it can slip through your fingers, but it can hold up a ship.” As a description of her own essence as an actress, that would be hard to beat.

It’s there in spades in Meek’s Cutoff, in which she plays one of a band of American emigrants trudging across the Oregon desert in the mid-19th century, in search of a new life. This is not a performance given so much as sweated out; you feel not only Williams’s skill as an actress, but her stamina as a woman. It’s a trait of people from rural Montana, where she lived until the family moved to San Diego when she was eight or nine. “There’s a kind of endurance that comes with living there,” she says decisively. “To make it through a winter is something to be celebrated.”

Williams began preparations for the film several months before shooting. “Everything in my life takes me more time than it takes other people. A 30-minute recipe for working mums takes me two hours. I have to wake up really early to feel I’m properly awake. That’s a long way of saying I need time to prepare for a film so I don’t feel like a phoney.” There’s a connection, she says, between these intensive methods and the fact that she dropped out of high school, took a correspondence course and upped sticks to Los Angeles at 15 to pursue her ambition. “In some ways, I’m giving myself an education I never got, as well as building up an area of expertise or knowledge separate from acting.”

Meek’s Cutoff extended her skill set to include knitting, lighting a fire without matches and baking bread from scratch. “We would play these games on set — which three people would you take with you from the cast and crew if you were going on the Oregon trail for real? Who would be the most use if you were facing your own death?” She laughs drily. “I just wanted to prove myself worthy of being on someone’s list. And I did it! I got on Kelly’s list.” That’s the film’s director, Kelly Reichardt, who previously cast Williams in Wendy and Lucy, as an isolated young woman slipping below the breadline.

‘So I see the conflict. I’m wrestling with the conflict’: Michelle Williams (Peter Kramer)

“I can’t imagine having an easier working relationship with anyone else,” Reichardt tells me. “I don’t know how I got so lucky to find her. She’s a very physical actor, with a great way of using her body. And when she shows up on set, her attitude is, like, ‘So, what are we doing?’ She’s up for anything. She’s a dream.”

Williams also has to brandish a gun in Meek’s Cutoff, and notched up a collection of dented soda cans from woodland target practice. “They’re on the counter in my kitchen,” she says fondly. “It’s nice to keep mementos like that when you’re back in your home life, where it’s all about cooking and laundry.” Of particular value is the wedding ring she wore in Blue Valentine. “It’s on the windowsill, in front of where I wash the dishes. I like these little things that only I know about.” She pauses. “And now I just told everyone,” she laughs, eyeing my recorder. “Great.”

Evidence of this friction is everywhere in her life and her conversation. From the outset of her career, she tried to exercise control. At 15, she secured legal emancipation from her parents to enable her to work as an actress. When the paparazzi began stalking her during the salad days of her relationship with Ledger, the unsmiling couple famously stood together, middle fingers raised aloft, while Ledger held up a handwritten message in perfect Anglo-Saxon. The attention did not abate once Matilda was born, or when the pair separated in 2007, or even in the aftermath of Ledger’s death in 2008 from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs.

'There’s a contradiction in any public performer who complains that everyone is looking at them' No wonder Williams polices so carefully the parameters of her conversation. Several times, she takes herself to the edge of privacy, then gestures to me to switch off the tape before she divulges anything further. When she simply won’t talk, she is honest about the reasons. She pulls her jacket around her blushing face when I ask about My Week with Marilyn, which co-stars Kenneth Branagh as Laurence Olivier. “I’m gonna break out in a rash if I talk about it,” she giggles. The problem, she says, is that she doesn’t know what the film is yet, and would rather not discuss it until she does. But she will admit that the part brought her a new-found admiration for Monroe. “I wasn’t as much of an admirer as I am now. I hadn’t reckoned on what a fine actress she was, especially comedically. Though what she craved was to be a great dramatic actress.”

Unusually, these interventions in the interview process also work in the opposite direction: when she takes an age responding to a question, it’s because she’s trying to find something she hasn’t said before. “I don’t want to give you some regurgitated answer,” she says helpfully. The impression is of someone in the service industry striving to ensure that my experience is as fulfilling as possible. I half expect to receive a customer-satisfaction questionnaire at the end of our encounter.

There’s a serious point, too — Williams is managing her visibility levels. “Attention is your ultimate enemy as an actor,” she explains. “The first time I got nominated for an Oscar, I kind of lost my way a little bit. This thing I liked to do, which felt private — all of a sudden, I was second-guessing in my work, and it felt like there were expectations that hadn’t been there before. It stymied me for a time, and it wasn’t until Wendy and Lucy that I really relaxed again.”

Williams wore an unflattering brunette pudding-bowl haircut for that film, and Reichardt recalls the actress enjoying the anonymity. “When she wasn’t shooting she’d be sitting on an apple box on the sidewalk. Nobody recognised her. She became good friends with people in the crew, which is who she tends to hang out with. I think that was probably her last taste of invisibility. I don’t think she has it any more.”

As Williams realises, there’s a contradiction in any public performer who complains that everyone is looking at them. I recommend to her the sketch in which Peter Cook, dressed as Greta Garbo, rides through the streets in an open-top car, proclaiming through a loud-hailer: “I vant to be alone.”

“Oh, that’s hilarious,” she laughs. “I think about Garbo a lot, actually. Even though she gave up acting, people were following her right up to her death. So, at a certain point, have you just made a deal with the devil and you’re never gonna be left alone? Am I ever gonna get the privacy I crave? I don’t know.” She sighs. “But what am I gonna do? I’m still making movies, I haven’t decided to quit. And with a small film like Meek’s Cutoff, I need to strap it on my back and go out and talk about it, otherwise it doesn’t get seen. So I see the conflict. I’m wrestling with the conflict. I just haven’t decided what’s going to win yet.”

Meek’s Cutoff is released on April 15