Michelle Williams secretly weds singer-songwriter Phil Elverum

In a new interview, four-time Oscar nominee Michelle Williams has revealed that she and indie singer-songwriter Phil Elverum had quietly married recently in the Adirondack Mountains region.

Williams, 37 -- who FX announced this week will play Gwen Verdon in an upcoming miniseries about theater legend Bob Fosse -- told Vanity Fair in an article posted Thursday  that her and Elverum's relationship is "very sacred and very special."

"I never gave up on love," said Williams, who has a 12-year-old daughter, Matilda, with the late actor Heath Ledger, who died in January 2008. "I always say to Matilda, 'Your dad loved me before anybody thought I was talented, or pretty, or had nice clothes.' "

The notoriously private actress conceded that, "Obviously I've never once in my life talked [publicly] 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 Matilda feel free to be herself, and I am finally loved by someone who makes me feel free."

Elverum, to whom she was introduced by a mutual friend, also had lost his partner and became the single parent of a young child. His wife, graphic novelist and musician Geneviève Castrée, died of pancreatic cancer in July 2016. She had been diagnosed the year before just four months after giving birth to the couple's daughter, Agathe. Under the band name Mount Eerie, Elverum, who was born in 1978, last year released the critically acclaimed album "A Crow Looked at Me" that commemorates Castrée's life and death. A second such album, "Now Only," followed in March. 

This month he moved from his home in Anacortes, Washington, to form a blended family with Williams in Brooklyn, where she lives.

"I don't really want to talk about any of it," Williams told the magazine of her personal life. "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?" She concluded, "Don't settle. Don't settle for something that feels like a prison, or is hard, or hurts you," adding, "If it doesn't feel like love, it's not love."

Williams has been nominated four times for an Academy Award, twice for supporting roles (2005's "Brokeback Mountain," 2016's "Manchester by the Sea") and twice for lead roles (2010's "Blue Valentine," 2011's "My Week with Marilyn").