Out of Heath's shadow

It's just Michelle Williams's luck that the moment she starts proving her acting chops after being known mainly as Dawson's Creek wild child Jen Lindley, she is undone by events outside of her control. The death of Heath Ledger, father of her three-year-old daughter Matilda, has led to the 28-year-old actress shying away from the public eye just as she receives the best notices of her career for her turn in Wendy and Lucy.

In Kelly Reichardt's tenderly paced film, Williams plays Wendy, a young waif who is driving to Alaska where she hopes to spend the summer working at a fish cannery, and start a new life with her dog, Lucy. Her plans are scuppered when her car breaks down in Oregon.

Unable to pay for the repairs, Wendy resorts to stealing and her well-being is left in the hands of locals, some of whom are more sympathetic than others. Much of the film is taken up with a desperate search for her missing dog.

The picture was named best film of 2008 by the Toronto Film Critics Association, which also awarded Williams the best actress prize. Most of the plaudits have centred on Williams. According to Variety, "Best of all is Williams, who doesn't say very much (no one in the film does), but who conveys an inexorable sense of longing for something more than life has given her." In The New York Times, A O Scott captures how far Williams has come from her days as a teen soap star. "Ms Williams, always a thoughtful, risk-taking actress, here expunges all traces of movie star glamour, dressing in brown, knee-length cut-off shorts and a shapeless blue sweatshirt, and framing her delicate, slightly elfin face with drab dark hair."

When Ledger died last year, it seemed that life had begun to imitate art. Here was exactly the same kind of unforeseen situation in which the characters she excels at playing always seem to find themselves. She met Ledger on the set of Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, in which she played his wife. While attention was lavished on the gay cowboys, it slipped by almost unnoticed that Williams was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

What should have been her cinematic breakthrough got lost, first in the gay cowboy headlines, then as news of her romance with Ledger broke, in gossip columns which were more interested in talking about the latest acting It couple than the acting skills of either. In fact, Brokeback Mountain was the point at which she showed a maturity of performance of which there had only been brief hints previously, most notably in The Station Agent where she played a sylph-like librarian. She is almost unrecognisable from the actress who meandered through Wim Wenders's post-9/11 opus, Land of Plenty.

Born in Kalispell, Montana, she and her family moved to San Diego, California, when she was nine years old. She first made headlines as a 15-year-old when the young actress emancipated herself from her parents. When I spoke to her about this, she insisted that this was done for professional reasons. The overarching influence of her stock and commodity trader father was evident in 1997 when, aged 16, she won the Robbins World Cup Trading Championships, just as her father had done, after converting $10,000 into $110,000 over the course of a year.

As her fame blossomed with the success of Dawson's Creek, Williams, like the character she played in the series, seemed to be linked with every young, successful single entertainer in the business, with a special penchant for musicians including Bright Eyes singer Conor Oberst. She then embarked on her ill-fated relationship with Ledger. Williams called off her engagement to the actor in 2007, two years after the birth of their daughter.

After Wendy and Lucy, the actress will next appear in Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, confirming her status as a firm favourite for auteurs. In Lukas Moodysson's upcoming Mammoth, Williams again plays the wronged woman. This time it's Gael Garcia Bernal who is off philandering while she's left at home holding the baby. She plays a surgeon, a vocation that stumped some critics when the film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, so at it odds it seemed with her porcelain frame.

And herein lies the problem that Williams has yet to overcome. So far she has excelled in roles, such as Wendy, where she is the innocent victim. It will be intriguing to see how she fares in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, based on Dennis Lehane's novel in which she stars with Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo.

For now, though, the sign of an excellent performance is when you cannot imagine another actor who could perform the role better. Williams's turn in Wendy and Lucy falls into this category, her performance papering over the cracks in a slight story that often lacks tension. Indeed, she is the film.

'Wendy and Lucy' is on general release