14 DAY TRIAL // Actress Michelle Williams in now featured in the February 2011 issue of Marie Claire magazine and, in between promoting her latest film “Blue Valentine” and denying rumors about a romance with co-star Ryan Gosling, she also talks a bit about Heath Ledger.
Though she later said she didn’t mean to, Michelle first broke her silence on what Ledger’s death meant to her in an interview with Nightline in December last year.
Now, she explains to Marie Claire that, even though she and Heath were no longer an item when he died of an accidental overdose 3 years ago, his death left an emptiness that she can’t fill to this day.
For a while, she tried to fill the void, the actress explains, but she eventually gave up when she realized there was no replacing him: she chose instead to respect and cherish his absence.
“Very obviously for me and for her [daughter Matilda], there’s a hole in our life. Of course, the natural inclination is to want to fill it and make it disappear, but what I’ve come to recently is that it’s impossible,” Williams says.
The emotional interview sees the 30-year-old actress repeatedly welling up, overwhelmed with emotion and sadness. But there is also a lot of dignity to her pain, the magazine writes.
“Nothing will fit in that hole because what we want back, we can’t get, which is this one person. I’m not going to rush anything and scamper around like a mad person and make myself crazy,” Williams says.
“I’m trying to be respectful of the absence. I’m not trying to fill it up. It is what it is,” she explains, adding she got the most help with a letter from a male fan who had lost his wife and was left to deal with her absence with his daughter.
Williams says she saw in that the promise that, one day, Matilda too “could smile like that,” like the mother-less girl in the photo she got in the mail.
She also goes to great lengths to deny she’s romantically involved with her “Blue Valentine” co-star Goslin, joking that her own mother is probably the first to want to believe the rumors are true.
As for what’s the hardest thing about her life right now, Williams says that’s got to be decision-making as a single parent, hands down.
“When things are difficult for me as a single parent, I always reflect on how much harder it would be if I didn’t have money. Everyone has challenges; everyone has a tragedy. I met mine a little early. Or a lot early,” she says.