Michelle’s untold love story
The actress finally gets her happy ever after
Finding Mr Right after Heath
Michelle Williams has always been pragmatic. “It’s hard to romanticise romance when you’re 36,” she admitted in early 2017, confessing that looking for love wasn’t high on her list of priorities.
“When you’ve been a parent for 11 years and you’ve done it alone, you don’t have romantic ideals because you have a practical understanding that you can do it by yourself. The romantic idea of meeting your person and having a storybook family life that looks like the model you grew up with, that doesn’t really exist for me.”
Then when she least expected it, everything changed. Eleven years after her heartbreaking split from Heath Ledger – the father of her 13-year-old daughter Matilda – and a decade after his shocking death from a drug overdose, Michelle quietly married indie singer-songwriter Phil Elverum, who, like her, is widowed and has a daughter.
They fell for each other quickly after being introduced by a mutual friend and kept
their romance private until they’d exchanged vows in July. In the months since, Michelle, 38, and Phil, 40, have been seen holding hands while antiquing with their girls in upstate New York and kissing on footpaths in Brooklyn.
“The time she took, the self-reflection, paid off,” a source close to Michelle tells
Woman’sDay. “She and Phil are a perfect match. She kissed a lot of frogs to get where she is now, but she doesn’t regret it one bit.”
As Michelle herself says, she “never gave up on love”. Phil – who lost his wife, artist Geneviève Castrée, to pancreatic cancer in 2016, when their daughter Agathe was just 18 months old – adores her with “radical acceptance”, she explains. “I am finally loved by someone who makes me feel free.”
Alovelost
She’s travelled a long, rocky road to get her second chance. When Michelle and Heath split in 2007, it wasn’t necessarily for good, according to Michelle’s best friend and Dawson’s
Creek co-star Busy Philipps, 39.
“I felt sad for both of them, but weirdly thought something would be figured out and it wasn’t the end of the story for them,” Busy writes in her new memoir. “They were so young and that baby was the light of both of their lives.”
But in January 2008, any hopes of a reconciliation ended when Heath was discovered unresponsive in his New York apartment. “Everyone knows how Michelle struggled after Heath’s death,” says our source. “She didn’t want to date for a while. She concentrated on being a great mum to Matilda – that was her only focus.”
Crushed and in mourning, Michelle had a difficult time. She tried to move on, dating film producer Spike Jonze, author Jonathan Safran Foer and actor Jason Segel. The source says, “Some of them were really great guys, but she put up so many walls that none of the relationships felt right. Michelle needed to take a step back and figure out what she really wanted.”
A friend of Jason’s confirms, “He was head over heels in love with Michelle but never felt like she was truly in their relationship 100%. Michelle was so kind and caring, but she kept a part of herself closed off.”
For a long time, Michelle beat herself up over her relationship status. “It’s a little bit difficult to contend with a feeling of failure for not living up to a standard of normal,” she said about not giving Matilda a two-parent upbringing.
“Sometimes it can feel alienating. At school functions, there’s only two of us single mothers. Everyone else has a partner, so we buddy up.”
And though Michelle is clearly thrilled that Matilda
now has a stepfather in Phil, she’ll never make peace with Heath’s death as far as her daughter is concerned.
“Matilda not having her dad, it just won’t ever be right,” she confesses.
Raisinghope
That said, Heath’s parents Kim and Sally Ledger feel indebted to Michelle for how wonderfully she’s raised their granddaughter. “She’s done a great job as a single mum,” Kim tells us, adding that he sees a lot of his son in Matilda too. “She’s got his beautiful, flowing limbs, and a lot of his mannerisms and his smile.”
And that’s all Michelle has ever wanted – for her daughter to be happy, even if that meant being a team of two for a long time.
“She’s always done her own thing,” says Dawson’s
Creek co-star James Van Der Beek. “At a certain point, she said, ‘I’m going to stop trying to impress everybody else and just follow my own gut.’ And that’s worked out well.”
Now Michelle has no regrets about waiting for the right man. Her advice for those struggling to find the right relationship? “Don’t settle for something that feels like a prison, or is hard or hurts you. If it doesn’t feel like love, it’s not love.”