On Movies: Almost lost the role for looking too young?

This isn't your typical actress' dilemma: fearing that you're going to lose a job because you look

too young

. But for

Olivia Williams

, who was slated for a key role in

Roman Polanski's

The Ghost Writer

, that's what almost happened.

"I was cast without meeting him," says the English actress, who plays the wife of a just-stepped-down British prime minister in Polanski's nimble political thriller - she's a kind of Cherie Booth to Pierce Brosnan's Tony Blair. And then, while Williams was in California - her base for the last few years, while she starred in the (recently canceled) Fox series, Dollhouse - she was summoned to Paris for an urgent conference with the director.

"It was very short notice because he got very worried that I was too young for it, and I think he was quite close to rescinding the offer," says Williams, all of 41 now. "It was one of those surreal moments: shooting a TV show on a beach in Malibu, and then getting a flight to Paris where it was horizontal sleet and snow, and meeting Roman Polanski in a restaurant, and flying back to Malibu.

"It was one of those weekends where you think, Did I just dream that?"

Clearly, the meeting went well - Williams is in the film, after all, playing a crisp and complicated soul opposite Brosnan and Ewan McGregor. McGregor is the unnamed titular character, a journalist brought in to help the British leader with his memoirs. Intrigue and nastiness ensue. (The Ghost Writer opened Friday at the Ritz East and the Showcase at the Ritz Center/NJ.)

But at the time, a year ago in that Paris brasserie, Williams wasn't so sure of keeping the part.

The meeting "was surprisingly all a bit silent at first," she recalls the other day, on the phone from London. "He just looked at me quite a long time. . . .

"I had got on the flight - it was an Air France flight, and I don't always get to fly first class, so I was a bit overexcited, and put all the free face creams on that Air France provided. All of which, I have to say, worked miraculously, and I got off the flight looking about 10 years younger than when I got on. So it was disaster - I was going to lose the role!

"And then we had a very nice dinner. I had a glass of red wine, which made my cheeks go rosy, and I thought I'm looking younger by the minute . . . it will be awful if I lose this job! But we had a hilarious, comical 20 minutes with his hair stylist and his makeup artist. The three of them had a very sort of Polish-French, high-octane argument while pulling my hair and wrinkling up my face.

"And I speak reasonable French and a smattering of Polish, and I established from the argument that, although it sounded bitter and furious, it had, in fact, a positive result.

"And it was quite good preparation for how Roman runs his set - these kind of larger-than-life exclamations which are all actually good-natured. They seem very frightening, but it's really like the barking of dogs at dawn and dusk - just habitual, rather than aggressive."

The Ghost Writer was shot in February through April of 2009, mostly in Germany, with the coastlines around Sylt doubling for Martha's Vineyard (lots of Yankee signage and U.S. license plates).

There wasn't an inkling at the time of the international legal troubles Polanski was soon to face. In the end, the filmmaker - who fled the United States in 1978 prior to sentencing on a charge of unlawful intercourse with a minor - edited The Ghost Writer while under house arrest in Switzerland, awaiting extradition to the States.

"We all thought we were going to be like any movie that he's made in the last 35 years," Williams says - just another film shoot someplace in Europe. "There was no hint of what was going to occur."

Williams, who is married to the actor and musician Rhashan Stone, with two young daughters, can also be seen right now in An Education, as Miss Stubbs, the schoolteacher who mentors Carey Mulligan's character in the coming-of-age drama. That film is nominated for three Academy Awards - for best picture, Mulligan's lead performance, and Nick Hornby's screen adaptation. Williams was in London last week for the BAFTAs, the British equivalent of the Oscars, where An Education had received eight nominations (Mulligan won one). Another film she did last year, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, about the late-'70s Cockney rocker Ian Dury, was also nominated.

"Very often in the arts, one feels that things don't get what they deserve - or the chances of them getting what they deserve are very remote," Williams muses. "But in this case, the whole project - Nick Hornby getting an Oscar nomination, and Carey Mulligan being recognized for what was not an accidental sort of young girl performance, but actually an incredibly mature piece of work - well, it's wonderful when recognition goes to people one feels deserve it.

"I am sort of astonished to see it up there in the best-film list, alongside Avatar and The Hurt Locker representing the other extremes. It's fantastic range this year.

"I'm also very proud to be part of it."

Williams says that she has fond memories of Philadelphia, where she shot M. Night Shyamalan's breakthrough The Sixth Sense, in 1998. Williams, of course, is the wife of Bruce Willis' character. A tricky role, to say the least.

"Happy days," she recalls. "I loved the Rittenhouse Hotel. And I'm still very good friends with [costar] Toni Colette. We explored Philadelphia together, and we discovered Bikram Yoga around the corner from the Rittenhouse, and it changed my life.

"I still do it. I did it this morning. I did it all the way through having two kids, and I think about that weird sealed room around the corner on Walnut Street where we first read in the pamphlet, "Hot Yoga."

"It looked mad! . . . I'm still an addict, and that was a gift that Philadelphia gave me."