Michelle Williams has spoken for the first time about Heath Ledger’s death and how it has affected her. She is promoting her film Wendy and Lucy, filmed in 2007 in the months following their break up, but before Heath’s death. Williams says that every day that passes her grief over Heath’s death gets worse.

Williams is jovial and chatty, until the conversation turns to Heath. You can see it’s still difficult for her to talk about him, and she hasn’t done so publicly until now. The first time Ledger’s name comes up, she bursts into tears. “It’s so sad,” Williams says. When she’s asked about how she’s been doing in the past year, she’s silent for a very long time. “I guess it’s always changing,” she says. There’s another pause. “What else can I say?” Her voice is breathy and fragile, and she takes a few gulps of air. “I just wake up each day in a slightly different place—grief is like a moving river, so that’s what I mean by ‘it’s always changing’.” She stops again. “It’s a strange thing to say”—her words unravel slowly, her eyes tear up—”because I’m at heart an optimistic person, but I would say in some ways it just gets worse. It’s just that the more time that passes, the more you miss someone. In some ways it gets worse. That’s what I would say.”

Michelle also talks candidly about her anger at the paparazzi and fears for her daughter’s safety:

As she walks back to her car, Williams spots an SUV parked on the side of the road. Is it the paparazzi? No, but her heart still sinks at the thought. The paparazzi are one topic that gets her so riled up, she spits out curse words. “It burns a fire inside of me, the s––– that I’ve seen people do to get at me or my daughter,” she says. “I won’t forget it, and I won’t support it. I don’t want my daughter growing up feeling spied on or threatened.” She can’t understand how many more pictures people need of her holding a coffee cup in one hand and Matilda in the other. Williams is especially enraged at female photographers, because she thinks women should be protective of mothers. She tried to give a particularly aggressive paparazzo career advice recently. “I said, ‘You’re better than this. Look at you! You’re young, you’re able-bodied, you have a brightness in your eyes. You’re above this.’ But you know what? She didn’t go away.”

[From Newsweek.]

Michelle says that if the intense interest in her personal life doesn’t cease she will give up acting, saying that she ‘likes’ acting, but now it comes with ‘baggage’. I get the feeling that she is saying she likes to act, but feels protective of her daughter. She describes acting as giving her self esteem. She probably also understands that as time passes we’ll forget about Heath Ledger and the interest in her and Matilda will be less intense.

Michelle says that she doesn’t want to work while Matilda is in school, to give her routine. Whether this means she will give up acting entirely or just work when she can isn’t specified.

There’s a scene in the film where Michelle’s character Wendy goes into a store and picks up a tabloid with Jennifer Aniston on the cover, where we are sort of acknowledging her as ‘Michelle the celebrity’ rather than ‘Michelle the actress’. In a film about the loss of the lead character’s best friend, this is like saying ‘yeah, she’s in a sad film following a sad time in her life, now lets go back to the movie’.

Michelle Williams is shown at a Wendy and Lucy screening in Hollywood on 11/8/08 and in stills from the film. Credit: WENN