Before Dawson's Creek, Michelle Williams won a futures trading championship with 1,000 percent returns
At seventeen, while scraping by on low-budget roles in Los Angeles, Michelle Williams entered a trading contest her father had taught her to play. She returned 1,000 percent, becoming the first woman to take the title. Then she landed Dawson's Creek and began a career built on quiet, difficult dramas.
Williams was born in Kalispell, Montana, on September 9, 1980, into a family that had lived in the state for generations. Her father, a commodities trader and author, twice ran for the US Senate as a Republican and taught her to fish, shoot and read widely. The family moved to San Diego when she was nine. A local staging of Tom Sawyer hooked her on acting, and her parents drove her to Los Angeles auditions; a 1993 Baywatch episode and the 1994 film Lassie were early credits.
Unhappy at school, she left after ninth grade for home tutoring and, at fifteen and with her parents' consent, filed for emancipation so child labour rules would not limit her work. She finished high school by correspondence in nine months, something she later regretted, and lived alone in Burbank taking forgettable parts to pay rent. The trading win came in the Robbins World Cup Championship; her father holds the top spot on its all-time list, and she ranks third.
From 1998 to 2003 she played Jen Lindley, a worldly New Yorker transplanted to a small town, on Dawson's Creek, filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina. She called the show her best acting class but admitted her own taste lay elsewhere. The steady salary let her spend the months between seasons in offbeat independent films, such as the Watergate spoof Dick with Kirsten Dunst, and an off-Broadway run in Tracy Letts's Killer Joe.
Brokeback Mountain brought her first Oscar nomination in 2005, and she became known for women carrying grief or isolation in Wendy and Lucy, Blue Valentine and Manchester by the Sea. She has won three Golden Globes, for playing Marilyn Monroe, the dancer Gwen Verdon, and a woman with terminal cancer in Dying for Sex, plus an Emmy for Fosse/Verdon.
Source: Michelle Williams (actress)
