MICHELLE WILLIAMS: HOW SHE LEARNED TO LOVE AGAIN
Over a decade after Heath Ledger’s tragic death, the actress and mom to Matilda has found peace, happiness and true love with indie musician and husband Phil Elverum.
Michelle Williams has always been pragmatic. “It’s hard to romanticize 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.”
I WAS HOLDING IT TOGETHER BY A STRING AND A PAPER CLIP.” MICHELLE WILLIAMS ON LIFE AFTER HEATH LEDGER’S DEATH
Then, when she least expected it, everything changed. Eleven years after her heartbreaking split from Heath Ledger, the father of her now-13-year-old daughter, Matilda, and more than 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 young daughter. They fell for each other quickly after being introduced by a mutual friend, and kept their romance private until after they’d exchanged vows in the Adirondack Mountains in July. In the months that have followed, Michelle, 38, and Phil, 40, have been seen holding hands while antiquing with their girls in upstate New York and kissing on sidewalks in Brooklyn. “The time she took, the self-reflection, paid off,” says an insider close to Michelle. “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 said in the September issue of Vanity Fair, she “never gave up on love.” Phil — who lost his wife, artist Geneviève Castrée, to stage 4 pancreatic cancer in 2016 when their daughter, Agathe, was just 18 months old — loves her with “radical acceptance,” she explained. “I am finally loved by someone who makes me feel free.”
A NEW BEGINNING
She’s traveled a long and rocky road to get her second chance. When Michelle and Heath split in the summer of 2007, it wasn’t necessarily for good, according to Michelle’s best friend since her Dawson’s Creek days, actress 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, This Will Only Hurt a
Little. “They were so young, and that baby was the light of both of their lives.” But on Jan. 22, 2008, any hopes of a reconciliation down the line ended when Heath was discovered unresponsive in his NYC apartment. “Everyone knows how Michelle struggled after Heath’s death,” says the insider. “She didn’t want to date for a while. She concentrated on being a great mom to Matilda — that was her only focus.”
Crushed and in mourning, Michelle had a difficult time. She tried to move on, dating a few high-profile stars such as her Synecdoche,
New York producer Spike Jonze, author Jonathan Safran Foer and actor Jason Segel (see box). “Some of them were really great guys: Jason, Spike, [artist] Dustin Yellin,” says the Michelle insider. “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.” Confirms a source close to Jason, whom she dated in 2012 and 2013, “He was head-over-heels in love with Michelle but never felt like she was truly in their relationship 100 percent. Michelle was so kind and caring, but she kept a part of herself closed off.”
MISSING OUT
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’s said about not giving Matilda the two-parent upbringing she herself had as a girl. “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, who performs under the name Mount Eerie, she’ll never make peace with Heath’s death as far as her daughter is concerned. “Matilda not having her dad,” Michelle told Porter magazine, “I mean, it just won’t ever be right.”
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 mom to bring her up,” dad Kim told Us. And 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,” her Dawson’s Creek costar James Van Der Beek tells Us. “I think at a certain point [she] just kind of said, ‘You know what? I’m going to stop trying to impress everybody else and just follow my own gut.’ And that’s worked out well.”
He’s talking about her career, of course, but it’s true for the rest of her life too. She trusted her gut, and now Michelle has no regrets about waiting for the right man. “Don’t settle,” she says. “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.”