In his mum's footsteps

Playing Steven Spielberg's mother meant being led on a merry dance. Michelle Williams tells RUSSELL BAILLIE.

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Michelle Williams had never been in a Steven Spielberg movie. But she’s now in the most Spielberg film ever, a drama in which the director looks back at his formative years. The Fabelmans is a film about a Jewish American family in the 1950s and 1960s as they shift from New Jersey to Arizona to northern California as father Burt Fabelman advances his career.

It’s centred on gifted, anxious, movie-making son Sammy, who, with his younger sisters, is raised by parents of seemingly mismatched temperaments – the pragmatic, pioneering computer designer Burt and the spontaneous, artistic and musical Mitzi. Both are based on Spielberg’s parents, Leah Adler ,and Arnold Spielberg, who divorced in 1966.

Adler died aged 97 in 2017, and Arnold Spielberg at 103 in 2020.

Their break-up influenced many of his films, mostly when he was dealing with aliens: in films such as Close Encounters ,of the Third Kind, ET and War of the Worlds, he gave us flawed fathers and mothers and split families.,

Williams is a veteran of troubled marriages in movies – Brokeback Mountain, Manchester by the Sea, Take This Waltz (in which she was a couple with The Fabelmans co-star Seth Rogen) and Blue Valentine. It was the last movie in that list, from 2010, that earned Williams the second of four Oscar nominations and sparked Spielberg to call and ask: “Will you be my mother?”