She Finds Her Secret Self Up on the Big Screen

“Dawson’s Creek” star Michelle Williams is a self-proclaimed bookworm, always curled up with something to read.

“Certainly on the set there are many times where she will be off to the side curled up reading a book,” says Paul Stupin, executive producer of the WB’s teen-angst drama. While making the British feature “Me Without You,” which opened Friday, Williams spent her downtime on the set reading the esoteric Marcel Proust.

Now 21 and entering her final year this fall on “Dawson’s Creek,” Williams feels for the first time as if she needs to expand her intellectual horizons. “I feel like I am running up against a wall in my mental development because there is no discourse available for me,” says the serious-minded actress who is light-years removed from her “bad girl” character of Jen on “Dawson’s Creek.”

“There is no back or forth, no challenge,” Williams continues, her words deliberate. “I process what I can from what I read, but nothing more is demanded from me. So I have to figure out how to go beyond what I am assimilating right now. I would love to take college classes in New York, though not necessarily for a degree.”

Williams graduated from high school at 15, so by the time she began “Dawson’s,” she had been out of school for a year. “I went to freshman year at a regular school and then I did correspondence in home and finished up three years in one year,” she says during a recent visit to L.A. Williams calls fellow “Dawson’s” stars--James Van Der Beek, Joshua Jackson and Katie Holmes--her “graduating class.”

Williams has a lot in common with her character of Holly in “Me Without You,” directed by Sandra Goldbacher. When Williams read the script, she felt Holly was her “secret me.”

A nominee for British film of the year, “Me Without You” explores the close, almost suffocating bond between two girlfriends over three decades in England. Williams’ Holly feels unattractive and constricted by her overprotective parents and so buries herself in books to escape her home life. Her possessive best friend, Marina (Anna Friel), hides her vulnerability under a veneer of sassiness and promiscuity. Although the two girls share everything life has to offer, Holly begins to feel that the friendship has turned into a trap and she is forced to decide if her life would be better without the self-destructive Marina.

Goldbacher met with several American actresses for the role of Holly. The director was open to having an American play the British character in order to get financing for the independent feature but also to secure the best actress. The film’s casting director suggested Williams to Goldbacher.

“She was Holly,” Goldbacher recalls when she first met Williams. “Michelle just felt so right. She is a very, very clever woman and articulate and very serious, and she completely understood the whole idea of this twisted female friendship. She has a kind of intensity about her.”

Although Marina comes across in the film as the destructive partner in the friendship, Williams believes her character is just as guilty. “She is just quiet about it,” says Williams, sitting barefoot and cross-legged in her hotel room. “Her silence hurts the relationship just as much. She is just more subtle about it.”

The two women won’t allow each other to change. “They both get typecast in their roles very early on,” Williams says. “They need each other to be that certain way. Marina is bright and she does have a facile mind, but she doesn’t utilize it because no one has ever allowed her to. The same could be true for Holly.”

Williams worked to perfect her British accent for the film, utilizing a dialect coach on the “Dawson’s Creek” set in Wilmington, N.C., and on location in London. “There were specific inflections to be placed in the accent according to where the girls grew up, where their parents had grown up and where the girls had gone to school,” Williams says.

She also stayed in accent off the set. “It was just easier to do it the next morning on the set and easier to assimilate into the culture,” Williams says. “It may sound sort of pretentious to stay in accent the whole time, but I was building relationships with new people and I had never done a British accent before.”

As soon as Williams arrived in England, Goldbacher had the actress and Friel do improvisational exercises at her house. “From the moment they met, they started in character,” the director says. “They started improvising like 12-year-olds in character and sort of built that up, and then they went out in the street as English 16-year-olds to shop and stuff. [Williams] was very brave about it. She entered into it with a great spirit.”

“It helped me not be afraid because I had no choice but to follow and jump right in,” Williams says. “There was no room for me to ask, ‘Is this going to be OK?’ I just had to be.”

Williams simultaneously was filming “Dawson’s” and “Me Without You” in the fall of 2000. “The hardest thing going back and forth from England to North Carolina is that a Southern accent and a British accent aren’t so far apart,” she says. “I would go back to North Carolina in the midst of all of these Southern accents and I’d come back and my British would be tweaked. There would be a slow drawl coming out in my British accent. That was difficult.”

Williams is using a slightly different British accent for her role as a neurotic young woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the off-Broadway production of Mike Leigh’s play “Smelling a Rat.” The actress made her New York stage debut two years ago off-Broadway in “Killer Joe.”

“I don’t have the training or the credentials to be on stage,” she says modestly. “But I do enjoy it and I am totally willing to serve my apprenticeship and work for it.”

Filming on “Dawson’s Creek” begins early next month. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next to my character,” she says of Jen, who deflowered Dawson last season. “She’s sort of mellowed out in her old age a bit.”

“It seems no matter what we throw at her, she is able to make it real and believable and vulnerable,” executive producer Stupin says. “I think there is really no limit to her versatility.”

Although Williams has no set career plans after “Dawson’s,” she knows she wants to keep growing as an actress. “But I think it’s a mistake to take projects just for that intention or just to shock people,” she says. “You attract what you are ready for. I am finding that to be true. The projects I have come across recently have been there for a reason. It’s all about timing. The last three years, I have felt pretty good about what I was doing.”