Photo by Laurent KOFFEL/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images(NEW YORK) — Surprise! Actress Michelle Williams is married.
The four-time Oscar nominee revealed in a new interview with Vanity Fair that by the time the magazine went to print, she would have wed singer-songwriter Phil Elverum in a secret ceremony in the Adirondacks.
A representative for the actress offered no additional comment, though Vanity Fair, which hits newsstands on Aug. 7, reported that the only people to witness the ceremony were a few friends and the couple’s two daughters from previous relationships.
“I never gave up on love,” she told the magazine. “Obviously I’ve never once in my life talked about a relationship… but Phil isn’t anyone else. And that’s worth something. Ultimately the way he loves me is the way I want to live my life on the whole. I work to be free inside of the moment. I parent to let [my daughter] Matilda feel free to be herself, and I am finally loved by someone who makes me feel free.”
Williams, 37, was previously in a relationship with actor Heath Ledger, with whom she had a daughter, Matilda, in 2005. After three years together, the couple split in 2007, and several months later, Ledger was found dead in his New York City apartment of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs.
Williams told Vanity Fair that for the past decade, she’s been searching for a man who made her feel the same sort of “radical acceptance” she got from Ledger.
“I always say to Matilda, ‘Your dad loved me before anybody thought I was talented, or pretty, or had nice clothes,'” she said.
Elverum knows those feelings of loss, too. Vanity Fair reported that the musician, whose stage name is Mount Eerie, was married to illustrator and musician Geneviève Castrée until her death from pancreatic cancer in July 2016, just 18 months after the couple welcomed a daughter. Recently, he and his child moved in to a Brooklyn home with Williams and Matilda.
“I don’t really want to talk about any of it,” she told the magazine. “But there’s that tease, that lure, that’s like, What if this helps somebody? What if somebody who has always journeyed in this way, who has struggled as much as I struggled, and looked as much as I looked, finds something that helps them?”
When asked what lesson can be taken from her story, she said: “Don’t settle. 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.”
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