Olivia Williams
Olivia Williams is an actor, born 1968.
Two years at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, three with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and then the screen came to her rather than the other way round. Olivia Williams, born in London in 1968, first registered as Jane Fairfax in a 1996 television Emma, the quiet one at the edge of an Austen adaptation, which turns out to describe a good deal of what followed.
Her gift is for women who are being handled and know it. Rosemary Cross in Rushmore is pursued by a fifteen-year-old and a middle-aged industrialist at the same time, and Williams plays the film with the level, tired courtesy of someone deciding how much of this to allow. Anna Crowe in The Sixth Sense sits across restaurant tables saying almost nothing and carries the emotional weight of the picture anyway. Ruth Lang in The Ghost Writer is the most enjoyable version: a politician's wife who is visibly the smarter half of the marriage.
She has never had a conventional star career, which appears to have been arranged deliberately, and she moves between British and American film and television without much regard for scale. Anna Karenina, An Education and Victoria & Abdul use her in a few sharp scenes each. Television has handed her the bigger parts: Adelle DeWitt in Dollhouse, Emily Silk in Counterpart, Camilla Parker Bowles in the fifth season of The Crown, and a Harkonnen Reverend Mother in Dune: Prophecy.
Movies (35)
- The Sixth Sense (1999)
- Peter Pan (2003)
- The Father (2020)
- Anna Karenina (2012)
- Seventh Son (2014)
- Valiant (2005)
- The Postman (1997)
- The Man from Elysian Fields (2001)
- Hanna (2011)
- Below (2002)
- Rushmore (1998)
- Emma (1996)
- Sabotage (2014)
- Maps to the Stars (2014)
- The Ghost Writer (2010)
- An Education (2009)
- Man Up (2015)
- The Last Days on Mars (2013)
- The Body (2001)
- Victoria & Abdul (2017)
- Justin and the Knights of Valour (2013)
- Salting the Battlefield (2014)
- Now Is Good (2012)
- Lucky Break (2001)
- To Kill a King (2003)
- Tara Road (2005)
- Another End (2024)
- Flashbacks of a Fool (2008)
- The White King (2016)
- Hyde Park on Hudson (2012)
TV (14)
Where to start with Olivia Williams
Rushmore is the entry point, because it is the performance that explains the rest: Rosemary Cross could easily be played as a prize to be won, and Williams refuses. Follow it with The Ghost Writer, where she gets to be openly clever and slightly dangerous, in the best-directed film on her resume.
For the popular route, The Sixth Sense is a lesson in how much an actor can do while being given almost nothing to say. An Education is a handful of scenes and a whole worldview. Counterpart is the television to commit to, a spy story about doubles that hands her two versions of the same woman and lets her make them genuinely different people. Maps to the Stars is the nastiest option, if that appeals.