Michelle Williams

In interviews, Michelle Williams comes across as so self-analytical—so thoughtful and reserved—that one can hardly believe she's a movie star. Williams got her big break when she was cast as bad girl Jen Lindley on the long-running teen drama series Dawson's Creek. As the show raised her profile, she started taking on significant film parts, exuding a heartfelt sincerity that cuts through her pixie-like looks. In 1999's Dick, opposite Kirsten Dunst, she showed a great aptitude for comedy as a sheltered high school girl who unexpectedly develops a crush on Watergate-era Richard Nixon. Most of her roles since have been in more serious, intimate independent dramas. In Brokeback Mountain, she played Alma, whose life falls apart when she realizes her husband is gay. The part earned Williams her first Oscar nomination, and she started a long-term romantic relationship with co-star Heath Ledger, with whom she had a daughter. The couple's subsequent split and Ledger's drug-related death proved to be fodder for the tabloids, and Williams has long struggled to keep her home life private. She formed a close working relationship with director Kelly Reichardt, starring in her lauded dramas Wendy and Lucy and Meek's Cutoff, and Williams later broke from her typically subdued roles in 2011's My Week with Marilyn, delivering a bold turn as the effervescent, troubled screen icon Marilyn Monroe.