Contents
* 1 Early life
* 2 Career
* 3 Personal life
o 3.1 Death of Heath Ledger
* 4 Filmography
* 5 References
* 6 External links
life
Williams was born in Kalispell, Montana, the daughter of Carla Ingrid (née Swenson), a homemaker, and Larry Richard Williams, a stock and commodities trader. Williams was nine, her family moved to San Diego, California, and, at an early age, she became interested in acting. At age 15, faced with her parents' disapproval, she emancipated herself from them. After completing the ninth grade at the Upper School of Santa Fe Christian Schools, in Solana Beach, California, she left school in order to pursue her acting career in Dawson's Creek.
In 1997, she won the Robbins World Cup Trading Championship, as her father had done 10 years earlier. won after turning $10,000 into $110,000 over the course of a year and that gain (as of 2006) is the fourth highest in the history of that competition (her father has the highest).
Career
Williams's career began in television, appearing in programs such as the 1990s version of Lassie, Baywatch, Step by Step, and Home Improvement. Her first film role was in the motion picture Species. Soon after, she won additional roles, including the Jessica Lange-Michelle Pfeiffer film A Thousand Acres and the 1998 movie Halloween H20: 20 Years Later with Jamie Lee Curtis and Josh Hartnett. Williams' star profile rose considerably when, in 1997, she was cast as one of the lead characters on the WB show Dawson's Creek. She would play Jen Lindley for all six seasons of the successful show.
During and after the show's run, Williams appeared in several films. Her first starring role was as Arlene in the film Dick, a satire of the Watergate scandal, opposite Kirsten Dunst. She starred opposite Christina Ricci in Prozac Nation, and also appeared in the HBO film If These Walls Could Talk 2, and several acclaimed indie pictures such as The United States of Leland, Me Without You, and Imaginary Heroes. For her performance in The Station Agent, Williams, along with the rest of the cast, received a Screen Actors Guild award nomination for Best Acting Ensemble. The following year, Williams starred in independent features Land of Plenty and A Hole in One. In 2005, critics and audiences took note of Williams' performance in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain. For that performance she won a Critic's Choice Award and received Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress.
In 2006 she appeared in The Hawk Is Dying with Paul Giamatti. In 2007, she was in Ethan Hawke's The Hottest State and in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There with Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Julianne Moore. In 2008, she starred with Ewan McGregor and Hugh Jackman in the Marcel Langenegger film, Deception.
It has been noted that Williams has "repeatedly taken chances on under-the-radar indies" such as The Station Agent and The Hawk Is Dying, "while catching the attention of auteurs like Wim Wenders (Land of Plenty), Todd Haynes (I'm Not There); and Martin Scorsese"; the Scorsese movie being Shutter Island, which also stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo.
Along with the Scorsese film, she shot four other films in succession. Independent filmmaker Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy was shown on September 27 and 28, 2008, at the New York Film Festival and opened on December 10, 2008. She is one of a "vivid ensemble cast orbiting around Philip Seymour Hoffman's harried theater director" in Synecdoche, New York, the first film directed by Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Adaptation.
Two other films include director Lukas Moodysson's Mammoth with Gael García Bernal; and Incendiary, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008. Williams recently said that she is "going to take a year off" as she "stopped feeling creative a little while ago, and ... [is] just realizing it now," and is also "feeling the strain of being a working single mom" and the untimely death of her former fiance, Heath Ledger.
In 2009, Williams was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Williams next starred with Ryan Gosling in the romance film Blue Valentine, for which she received Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations for Best Actress.
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