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.”
Yipes. Williams has taken time off from acting to be a mother to her daughter with Ledger, Matilda and later says she considers giving up acting altogether explaining, “I want [Matilda] to have a routine. I want the plainest, simplest, most ordinary, habituated routine possible.” And can you blame her?