Michelle Williams plays Marilyn Monroe in “My Week With Marilyn,” with Eddie Redmayne (left) as her caretaker, Colin Clark, and Dougray Scott as her husband, Arthur Miller. Updated: November 17, 2011 5:50PM
“A career is wonderful, but you can’t curl up with it on a cold night.” — Marilyn Monroe On this particular night, the actress who plays Marilyn Monroe isn’t curling up with a script. “I’m in my pajamas and that’s delicious,” says Michelle Williams, who has settled in for the night. “I’m going to make some mac and cheese for my daughter while I talk to you. It’s going to be an evening just curled up reading to her.”Her daughter, of course, is 6-year-old Matilda, whose father was the late actor Heath Ledger. Williams, 31, usually keeps all matters Matilda quiet, but not tonight for some reason. “Motherhood has changed my life in just every way,” she says. “It’s true that just watching children play is the best acting lesson.“Parenting can be the ultimate creative act. Of course, a lot of things try to get in your way. There is stress, work, and frustration. You can so easily bring those things into the room with you. But I try to have nights like this where we just leave it all on the outside.”Acting experience helps. “Being a great parent does take a tremendous amount of creative effort,” she says. “I play with her. I shake a move. I use what I got to convince her to eat her dinner and go to bed.”She laughs. “Taking the direct approach doesn’t work for me. Being creative does — and I just love it.”Williams also loves being creative on the big screen. To that end, she’s enjoying the role of her career and one that’s destined to bring her a best actress Oscar nomination.She plays the bombshell in “My Week With Marilyn” (opening Wednesday), about a week of Monroe’s life in 1956 when she shot the film “The Prince and the Showgirl.” Directed by Simon Curtis, it revolves around her need to be taken seriously and how director and co-star Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) wouldn’t put up with her moods, her tardiness or her need to practice only Method acting. It also narrows in on the troubles between Monroe and her husband, Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott). Williams relished playing Marilyn — both the fragile, shaken, insecure woman and the screen siren. “I think I’m still coming down from the experience,” she says. “She’s such a complicated woman, which I loved playing. She was an ever evolving process.”Transforming into Marilyn wasn’t Williams’ main objective. “It was amazing to see what I looked like transformed. But it wasn’t just about that Day One of seeing myself as Marilyn. It was about on Day 30 how I felt about her, which went beyond a look.” It was crucial to play on Marilyn’s nuances. “There have been many previous representations of Marilyn that were impersonations, and I didn’t want to go that route,” Williams says. “I wanted to explore this in a deeper way.”She still had to get the basics down.“I watched all the movies,” she says. “I got my hands on the Marilyn interviews and read the books. I tried her walk. I figured out how she held her mouth and why she talked in that way. But it was deeper for me. I tried to think about what she was feeling. I wanted to find the person and not just the icon. “I came to the conclusion that Marilyn Monroe was a role that she played. She carefully honed that character and made it work for her. She made it work for everyone to the point where they confuse the woman with the role.” Williams shot the film in the same studio where “The Prince and the Showgirl” was shot. “My dressing room was Marilyn’s actual dressing room,” Williams says. “It made it special.” She also filmed at the English residence, called Parkside House, that Marilyn rented. Her own climb to stardom began in Montana and started with the series “Dawson’s Creek,” which led to movies including “Brokeback Mountain” — where she met Ledger — and then “Blue Valentine” and “Shutter Island.”Williams lives in New York, and her social life revolves around hanging out on playground with other moms. “I love that children enjoy repetition,” she says. “They play the same game over and over again and it doesn’t bore them. “It’s a lot like acting. You do take after take of the same scene and think, ‘I want to do it again.’ With my daughter, I try to change it up a little bit to keep it exciting for her. But I always encourage her to follow her instincts.”Big Picture News Inc.© 2011 Sun-Times Media, LLC. All rights reserved. This material may not be copied or distributed without permission. For more information about reprints and permissions, visit http://www.suntimesreprints.com/. To order a reprint of this article, click here.