Allison Howell Williams is an American actress best known for portraying the insecure and self-centered narcissist Marnie Michaels on the HBO comedy-drama series “Girls.” In an interview with Buzzfeed, she said “Marnie would drive me crazy if we were friends in real life. But I have to put that out of my head in order to play her.”

Her work on “Girls” earned her a Critics' Choice Award nomination and led to her getting the title role in the television special “Peter Pan Live!” She gained further fame for her role as Rose Armitage in the social thriller-horror film “Get Out,” which earned her a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination.

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Williams was born and raised in New Canaan, Connecticut to a television family. Her father is former “NBC Nightly News” anchor and managing editor Brian Williams and her mother is the TV producer Jane Gillan Stoddard. Williams attended Yale University, where she majored in English and was a member of Morse College and St. Elmo Secret Society. While in college, she was a member of the improv comedy troupe Just Add Water and acted in the YouTube series “College Musical.”

Williams has also appeared in the Netflix horror film “The Perfection,” which reunited her with “Girls” writer and director Richard Shepard. Similar to her character Marnie Michaels, Williams portrays Charlotte, a high-strung musician working in the arts.

Williams was cast as Kit Snicket throughout the second and third seasons of the Netflix comedy-drama show “A Series of Unfortunate Events” and in 2020 appeared in the Swedish thriller film “The Horizon Line.”

Williams is set to star and executive produce the upcoming science-fiction horror film “M3GAN.” She will portray Gemma, a brilliant roboticist at a toy company who uses artificial intelligence to develop a life-like doll, leading to dangerous consequences.

In addition to her burgeoning acting career, Williams has been an ambassador for Horizons National, which seeks to advance equitable learning opportunities for students, and has done work with Product Red to fund HIV/AIDS programs in Africa. She is currently involved with the Transformational Prison Project as an advocate for criminal justice reform.