'I couldn't have done this a decade ago': Michelle Williams. Photo / Getty Images
Michelle Williams tells Jane Mulkerrins why she had to 'become a bigger person' to play dancer Gwen Verdon.
If Michelle Williams "had 100 lives to live" she would choose to spend one in a marriage like that of Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon.
"They reached their highest highs with each other, as well as their lowest lows," says Williams, who plays Verdon in a glossy new television drama that tracks the star dancer's fiery partnership with Fosse, the choreographer and director with whom she worked on such Broadway classics as Sweet Charity and Chicago. "She was the greatest interpreter of his work, and he was the greatest instructor of her art."
By the time Verdon met Fosse, in a Manhattan rehearsal studio in 1955, she was 30 years old, had already won her first Tony Award, for Cole Porter's Can-Can, and been cast as the lead in Damn Yankees, for which she would win her second. Fosse – a 27-year-old talent on the rise – had just been hired as choreographer of the latter. Together they became one of the most formidable couples in showbusiness, apparently unhindered by the fact that Fosse was still married to his second wife, Joan McCracken. Fosse divorced McCracken in 1959 and married Verdon the following year. In 1963, their daughter, Nicole, was born. By 1971, they had separated.
The drama Fosse/Verdon, was nominated for 17 Emmy awards – including acting nods for both Williams and Sam Rockwell, who plays Fosse. If it doesn't shy away from the darkness cast on the couple's relationship by Fosse's addictions to alcohol and prescription drugs or his affairs with other women, including actresses Jessica Lange and Ann Reinking, nor does it underplay their creative achievements. They continued to collaborate professionally and never divorced; when Fosse died in 1987, Verdon was at his side.
"Bob said if they could have lived inside a rehearsal room, they would have stayed together forever," Williams tells me. "Their creativity was their lifeblood, that is what kept them connected. They had this perfect creative symbiosis – and I am sure that was very exciting and sexy to be at the heart of." She smiles wryly. "It's just… that kind of volatility doesn't make for a stable home environment."
In order to recreate that charged home environment, Fosse/Verdon's creators hired Nicole Fosse as a consultant and executive producer for the series. According to Williams, she revealed "a very broad spectrum of detail… everything from how her mother would pick unusual words, so her phrasing wasn't what you expect it to be, to her memories about how they tested if the pasta was done by throwing it at the ceiling".
Williams disappears completely into the role, nailing not only the physicality that made Verdon such a captivating dancer, but also her breathy, theatrical voice and idiosyncratic speech patterns. "I feel like I started prepping for this role at eight, with tap lessons," Williams laughs. "Everything I've ever learned I had to call upon for this."
Before filming began, she spent many Sundays in six-hour dance rehearsals. How did she have the energy, I ask. "It's fear," she says. "There's nothing as motivating as sucking. Especially for a New Yorker – we have such high standards for ourselves." She also turned to meditation. "I don't know how to say this without sounding weird – but I had to become a bigger person in order to play Gwen. I had to expand my consciousness."
Williams, who will turn 40 next year, says it's not a process she could have imagined putting herself through as a younger actress. "I am excited to feel the kind of strength that comes with ageing, getting to the place where you can first of all identify the thing that you want, second of all believe in yourself enough that you can achieve it, and third, be bold enough to ask for it. I couldn't have done this at 28 and a half; I could only just do it at 38 and a half."
Born in Montana in 1980, Williams moved with her family to San Diego when she was nine. Her mother, Carla, was a housewife; her father, Larry, a commodities trader who twice ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate as a Republican candidate. After making her film debut in Lassie at the age of 14, Williams legally emancipated herself from her parents – common practice for child actors at the time, to allow them to work adult hours – then moved, alone, to Los Angeles. By 18, she was playing tearaway teenager Jen Lindley in the soapy drama Dawson's Creek, which kept her in steady employment for six years until the final episode in 2003. However, it didn't give her what she has called "the thing I most wanted, which was respect and a good sense of myself – I wasn't viewed as an artist".
That recognition came in 2005 with her Oscar-nominated performance as the wife of a gay cowboy in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain. On the set of that film, Williams fell in love with her co-star, Heath Ledger; their daughter, Matilda, was born in November that year. They split up after three years together and, five months later, in January 2008, Ledger died of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs.
Notoriously private, Williams has rarely discussed her personal life since (and I am instructed not to ask about it), but, in September last year, she told Vanity Fair magazine that she and Phil Elverum, an American songwriter, had married in a secret ceremony in upstate New York. "I never gave up on love," she said. To me, she makes no comment on her marriage, but a couple of weeks after we meet, it is reported that she and Elverum have separated.
Fosse/Verdon marks Williams's first appearance on the small screen since her Dawson's Creek days – a stratospheric 16-year stretch during which she picked up three further Oscar nominations (for Blue Valentine, My Week with Marilyn and Manchester by the Sea) and appeared on Broadway, first as Sally Bowles in a 2014 revival of Cabaret then, in 2016, as the victim of a sex offender in the David Harrower play Blackbird.
"The medium doesn't really factor in my decision-making so much as where the thing is being made," she says. "I will do just about anything to stay at home in New York, because it is so agitating as a mother not to be able to be present in the way that I want to be. Whether it is a TV show, a film, a play – I have tried to adapt to the medium so that I can work from home."
Having gained a reputation for giving intense, emotionally charged performances, more recently Williams has discovered a new lightness in musical roles: first as Charity Barnum in The Greatest Showman – which was also shot in New York – and now in Fosse/Verdon. "I discovered that I really loved it," she tells me. "There is a childlike aspect to singing and dancing. It turns off your critical thought. You get lost in the flow of the song or the dance, and that's pretty blissful."
She'll be testing her musical mettle again soon in a Janis Joplin biopic, Janis, before playing teacher-turned-astronaut Christa McAuliffe in The Challenger and a pro-choice activist in Sixties Chicago, in This Is Jane. Based on Laura Kaplan's book The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service, the film follows a group of American women who provided terminations before the legalisation of abortion in 1973.
If, together with the new TV series, these roles suggest that Williams now only has eyes for true stories of boundary-breaking women, it's worth noting that Verdon was originally expected to appear as a secondary figure in a drama about Fosse. There was no plan to explore in any detail either Verdon's own dramatic life story – born with severe rickets, she was put in dance class by her mother aged three to straighten and strengthen her legs; at 17, she was raped and impregnated by a man whom her parents then forced her to marry – or her critical contributions to Fosse's legend. "When this project was originally conceived, it was just Fosse – it was just Bob's story," Williams tells me. "By the time I came on board, it was Fosse/Verdon, but I think it says a lot about how the climate has shifted in the past two years that they changed it."
The gender balance of the show – which now treats Williams and Rockwell as joint leads – is significant for her in other ways, too. In January last year, it emerged that Mark Wahlberg, her co-star in Ridley Scott's Getty family drama All The Money In the World, had been paid US$1.5 million for the reshoots required when Kevin Spacey was replaced in the film at the 11th hour by Christopher Plummer. For the same reshoots, Williams was paid less than US$1,000. Speaking at a hearing about the gender pay gap in Washington DC in April this year, Williams said she was "paralysed in feelings of futility" after learning of the disparity.
After 25 years in front of the camera, Fosse/Verdon is the first ever job for which Williams has enjoyed pay parity with a male co-star. "That," she admits, "came as a very nice surprise." Her surprise alone suggests that the fight for equal recognition – a struggle in which Gwen Verdon was engaged all those years ago – isn't over yet.
Ebony Lamb performs Successful Feelings. Made with funding from NZ On Air. Video / Locals Only