Heath Ledger & Michelle Williams

Michelle Williams covers the October issue of Vogue, where she talks not about fashion but about her grief after Heath Ledger’s untimely death of an apparent drug overdose last year. The two dated for three years after meeting on the Brokeback Mountain set, and Williams gave birth to their daughter Matilda shortly after, but they split in 2007. Michelle is still grieving for the father of her child, but things finally seem to be looking up for Williams — as she said, “I feel hopeful and grateful. For a while I thought we had lost everything. It makes you want to love better and live better.”

“I didn’t know what my boundaries were for a long time, which made interviews feel very unsafe. I can talk about grief because that’s mine, about single parenting, about trying to balance work and kids. But what I don’t have to talk about is what happened between Heath and me in our relationship.

Brokeback Mountain was an unrepeatable moment in time, a very charmed time in my life. I was in love. I was in a movie I was proud to be a part of, and with a beautiful brand-new baby. Everything was good in that moment.
But after Ledger passed away and she was raising Matilda on her own, Michelle says she didn’t cope so well. “I was holding it together by a string and a paper clip in the fall and winter,” she said. “I didn’t know if I could keep it all together… You console yourself by saying it’s all a deepening process. But it’s wired. After the first year, the pain is less intense — it’s less immediate. But the magical thinking goes away too. And that’s a whole new reckoning.”

And as for Matilda, who looks like the spitting image of her father? “Every time I really miss him and wonder where he’s gone, I just look at her.”