Michelle Ingrid Williams (born September 9, 1980) is an American actress best known as Jen Lindley on Dawson's Creek.
Born in Kalispell, Montana, she is the eldest of the five children of Larry, a commodities broker, and Carla Williams, a homemaker. When she was nine, her family moved to San Diego, California. Her mother took her to auditions in Los Angeles where she won her first film role, as a space alien who turned into Natasha Henstridge in the 1995 movie Species. She graduated from high school at fifteen and was emancipated from her parents so she could pursue an acting career. She won several small roles before she was cast as Jen Lindley on Dawson's Creek, the part that would make her a star.
On Dawson's Creek, her character, only fifteen, had been too much for her parents to handle, drinking, partying, having sex from age twelve, so she was exiled from her home in New York, New York to live in Capeside, Massachusetts with her maternal grandmother. Jen was everything her grandmother was not: jaded, cynical, irreligious, and more, leading to frequent arguments and her eventually being kicked out of the house. The show would run for six seasons, from 1998 to 2003.
Her first starring role in films was as Arlene in Dick (1999), a satire on Richard M. Nixon directed by Andrew Fleming in which she and her friend Betsy (Kirsten Dunst) stumbled onto the Watergate burglary, became the president's dog walkers, and fed Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Leonid Brezhnev pot brownies. Arlene developed a crush on the President but when she and Betsy saw the real Nixon--mean, foul-mouthed, and scheming--they turned to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to tell the real story of what was going on in the White House, becoming their source "Deep Throat". Though very well reviewed, the film was a flop at the box office, making back less than half its production costs.
She has been in a half-dozen subsequent films, some of them well-reviewed (e.g. The Station Agent, Me Without You), but none have been great commercial successes.
