Michelle Williams still takes acting lessons.

The 42-year-old actress has been nominated for four Academy Awards since starting her career in Hollywood in the late 1990s but admitted that she finds the tuition process to be "calming."

She said: "I take acting classes. It’s not like slating my name. It’s all technical. It’s about your body and intentions and super objections. Sometimes I think it’s really just a way to calm yourself and feel like when you do show up, you deserve to be there in some way."

The 'My Week With Marilyn' star - who recently became a mother for the third time but already has Matilda, 16, with the late Heath Ledger and two-year-old son Hart with husband Thomas Kail - went on to explain that there is a "different state of mind" once the cameras start to roll on set before citing 'The Sound of Music' actress Julie Andrews as her inspiration.

Speaking as a panellist during the MoMA Contenders series, she added: "I think there is a technical aspect that you build, and then it stops because the second you start filming and committing things, you can’t keep building. Then you have to be in a different kind of state of mind. You build as much as you can and then that goes into another.

"Julie Andrews is almost too good to be true. The great thing about having children is you are still watching those movies. “I just always return to Julie Andrews. That incandescence is almost too good to be true. But she was real. I’ve got to give a shoutout to my 17-year-old who has a framed photo of Julie Andrews in her bedroom."