Michelle Williams almost missed out on the job that’s earned her an Emmy nomination.
The actress is a front-runner to scoop a Lead Actress award Sunday night, for her role in “Dying For Sex,” the FX limited series that she executive produced and stars in — playing a cancer patient determined to pursue her sexual desires in the face of death.
But Williams, 45, almost didn’t take the role, because it was originally set to film in Los Angeles. She has built her life in New York City, for years as a single mom and now with a husband, producer Tommy Kail, and three small children. This is a city she loves but that has also been a place of great tragedy.
It’s been 17 years since the shocking overdose death of actor Heath Ledger, the father of Williams’ daughter Matilda, now 19.
Although she and Ledger had split up the year before, reportedly because of his substance abuse, Williams said in 2011 that the loss left a hole in the lives of her and Matilda.
“Nothing will fill in that hole, because what we want back, we can’t get, which is this person,” she told Marie Claire.
Now, people who know Williams are thrilled to see her thriving both professionally and personally.
“She deserves it. Heath would not be surprised if he were here,” said Diana Ossana, a screenwriter on “Brokeback Mountain” — the movie on which Williams met and fell in love with Ledger. “I’m just so happy to see how successful she is.
Processing her grief, trying to figure out what was best for her daughter — it took her a while. Michelle had so much to process in terms of her loss, love, and what was best for Matilda.
“She has a spine of stainless steel,” Ossana told Page Six.
Williams’s inherent talent for conveying both grit and vulnerability have made her compelling to watch on screen and stage.
In “Dying For Sex,” she portrays Molly Kochan — who was a New Yorker in real life and who left her marriage after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, in search of a sexual awakening.
“She picks roles that are tough to play. She does it with such grace. When the character turns off, she’s her bubbly, really sweet self,” actress Jillian Mercado, who appeared in the show, told Page Six of Williams.
“She’s been through so many things — so many ups and downs, heartbreak, death. [But] she’s such a light person — she’s magical in a way … even with such a heavy role like this she was just such a delight to work with.”
Despite the commitment to her work, Williams’ heart, Mercado said, was always with her family at home.
“She was always talking about how she just wanted to go back home and be with her children. I could see the glow in her face — how happy she was.”
Williams spoke in 2012, to GQ, about how “I really wanted, and I really expected or imagined, that Matilda would have siblings that were close to her age.”
While that took longer than planned, Williams does finally have the bigger family she dreamed of.
She recently revealed that she and Kail, whom she married in 2020, had recently welcomed a daughter by surrogate — joining their sons, who were born in 2020 and 2022. (Only the name of their eldest, Hart, is publicly known.)
The two met while making the FX series “Fosse/Verdon” in 2018, for which Williams also won an Emmy.
At the time, Kail, 48, was married to actress Angela Christian and Williams was wed to musician Phil Elverum.
The only thing more shocking than her split from Elverum was the marriage itself. When the actress revealed she had secretly wed the musician, who records under the name Mount Eerie, in the Adirondacks in 2018, their romance had been kept entirely secret.
“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,” she gushed to Vanity Fair at the time.
Elverum’s first wife, Canadian artist Geneviève Castrée, died of pancreatic cancer in 2016 — just a year after the birth of their daughter.
Williams, the widower and their daughters were supposed to have a forever home in the 6,500-square-foot mansion she had purchased and renovated in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park South neighborhood.
But it was not meant to be.
A source told People at the time of her split from Elverum, just a year into the marriage, that she “jumped quickly into a permanent relationship without giving it a chance to work into something over time.”
It was an uncharacteristic move for Williams, who had dated many high-profile men over the years but never gotten too serious — among them, actor Jason Segel (himself up for Lead Actor in a Comedy Series, for “Shrinking,” at this year’s Emmys), directors Spike Jonze and Cary Joji Fukunaga, artist Dustin Yellin, novelist Jonathan Safran Foer and financial consultant Andrew Youmans.
In the public’s imagination, at least, it was like she could not find a love that lived up to what she had with Ledger.
Ossana recalled how quickly a spark ignited between the two, who played husband and wife in “Brokeback Mountain.”
“The toboggan scene, when we first see her with Ennis [Ledger] on the snowy little hill. She fell off and hurt her knee. We had to rush her to the ER. Heath was looking at her — I saw it right there. He was already in love with her. They were only on set for a week,” Ossana recalled.
The two quickly began dating, and both were nominated for Oscars for the movie. Matilda was born two months before the movie hit theaters in October 2005.
Williams — who found fame playing Jen Lindley in the teen drama “Dawson’s Creek” — and Ledger became paparazzi fixtures and were often photographed near their $3.6 million Boerum Hill townhouse, while neighbors knew them for a low-key life, dining at local spots like the Good Fork in Red Hook.
Ledger died of an accidental prescription drug overdose in a Soho apartment five months after they split.
“I saw her [Williams] after Heath passed away. It was hard for both of us,” Ossana recalled.
Soon after, Williams and Matilda fled to upstate New York, where the actress’ longtime friend, future “Succession” star Jeremy Strong, moved in to help her cope.
“Jeremy was serious enough to hold the weight of a child’s broken heart and sensitive enough to understand how to approach her through play and games and silliness,” Williams told Variety in 2022.
But motherhood has always been her No. 1 role.
“She was always with her daughter,” a Red Hook bar owner told Page Six of when Williams lived with Matilda in the neighborhood in 2012, noting they frequented the Pioneer Works arts center.
Up next, she and Kail will once again mix their personal and professional relationships.
He will direct her, beginning in November, in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Anna Christie” at Saint Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.
One of her biggest fans, Mercado hopes to see Williams glowing on the Emmy stage Sunday: “She deserves all the wins.”
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