Michelle Williams: The Young Old-Timer

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https://lebeauleblog.com/2019/07/19/...ung-old-timer/

Michelle Williams is a four-time Oscar nominee. Her career has been truly impressive. It’s easy to forget that twenty years ago, Williams was starring on the hit teen drama, Dawson’s Creek on the WB and trying her hand at movies with Halloween: H20. In this profile from the September 1998 issue of Movieline magazine, Williams showed signs that she might outlast her contemporaries.

The first time I meet Michelle Williams, the wide-eyed 18-year-old star of TV’s Dawson’s Creek and Halloween: H20, she’s at a photo shoot and she’s wearing half-unbuttoned blue jeans, a half-unbuttoned shirt and braided pigtails. She’s also running around in bare feet. I feel like I’m on the set of Hee Haw. But when she greets me, she shakes my hand with a firmness her lawyer must envy. Who taught this petite, blonde teenager to greet like this, anyway?

“Actually, my father,” Williams tells me. “We were fishing when I was seven or eight. He told me to pick up a freshly caught fish. I did. He said, ‘You feel this fish?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And then he told me that this was the way some people shake hands. Then he shook my hand, firmly grasped it and said, ‘This is how you shake hands.'”

When I meet Williams the next day for our interview, she looks more like a normal teen–black Adidas workout togs, white sneakers. I tell her that given this getup, I can’t imagine her in the skimpy show-all shirts most actresses tend to wear in horror movies. “Yeah, it seems like erect nipples are a prerequisite for any horror movie,” snaps Williams. “I don’t know if there will be any in H20. I wasn’t checking my own. And it wasn’t in the audition.”

In case you hadn’t noticed, Williams is not exactly a just-off-the-bus, breathless ingenue. She began acting at age nine in San Diego and by the time she was 16, she was legally emancipated from her parents and living alone in L.A. It wasn’t long before she was landing TV appearances on shows like Home Improvement and Baywatch, and film roles in Species and A Thousand Acres. Then came the call that put her on the Young Hollywood map: she won the role of the big-city girl who moves to the sleepy fishing town of Dawson’s Creek. Written by Scream scribe Kevin Williamson, Dawson’s Creek quickly became the WB’s highest rated show ever. It was a short leap from there to two movies–H20 and the upcoming comedy Dick, in which Williams plays a teenager who snoops around the Nixon White House.

I ask Williams what it was like working with Jamie Lee Curtis, who played Laurie Strode in the first two Halloween movies and plays the grown-up Laurie in H20. “Jamie Lee and I would sit in her room and make fun of her old Halloween movies,” Williams replies. “Watching the second one, we laughed at the wig she wore. She was dying, saying, ‘This is so ridiculous! I can’t believe I did that.'”

I comment to Williams that being the star of H20, not to mention Dawson’s Creek, must make for an active dating life. “Are you kidding?” she says. “They never ask.” But, I protest, what about all those premieres, where guys must fall over each other to get to her? She just looks at me. “Are you for real?” she finally asks. “Making a lifestyle out of going to premieres is just a dead end. I can’t imagine anything worse than a crowd of people. It makes me ill. Honestly, I would rather be at the dentist.”

OK, so perhaps she avoids the limelight, but she must go out a bit. Surely she must have a fake ID. “God no,” she fires back, sounding mildly outraged. “Where do you get this stuff from? I’ve been carded, but it was a long time ago, and my friends and I just left, to save ourselves from embarrassment. But I haven’t been carded recently. No one asks my age anymore. I guess I must look older than I am.” Williams stops a moment and a look of surprise falls across her face. “Am I getting old?”

Not on the outside, I’m thinking. In her head, well….But then, you have to grow up fast just to stay above water in showbiz. When I ask Williams what kind of a reaction she gets from being on a cult series, she drives that point the whole way home with the anecdote she relates: “One girl came up to me in a roller skating rink and she said, ‘I hate you on the show and I think you’re a bitch, but can I have your autograph anyway?'” A few exchanges like that would be enough to age your psyche a decade or so beyond its years. As for the rest, she needn’t worry. It’ll be many years before she watches herself in Halloween: H2O and says, “This is so ridiculous! I can’t believe I did that.”