Anna Kendrick breaks silence on losing her father in November to liver cirrhosis

Anna Kendrick has opened up about mourning her father William Kendrick, who died in November at age 75.

The Alice, Darling star recently appeared on actor Dax Shepard’s podcast Armchair Expert, in which she spoke candidly about her father’s funeral and how she’s “prepared” herself for the sad news over the past decade.

Speaking at the beginning of the podcast, Kendrick said that her father died at age 75 due to end-stage liver cirrhosis. The Pitch Perfect actor told Shepard that she had recently come from her father’s funeral in Maine, which took place “about a month” before the newest episode was recorded.

Kendrick, 37, said on the podcast that she and her older brother, Michael, had “sort of been prepared” for her father’s passing.

“Especially in the last couple of years, there were constantly these updates about his health, and we don’t talk about anything,” she said. “So, you know, there were these very vague but somehow very serious updates happening all the time and we couldn’t really read between the lines and figure out, ‘What are we talking about? I would just love a timeline.’ But we can’t really ask those questions.”

She continued: “We were always trying to interpret what was happening. And [Michael] and I were talking about how we’ve sort of been prepared for the call to come at any time for the last 10 years. Because, again, my dad was larger, he had heart problems in the past, and just generally not a man who kept his health in good order. It always was just, ‘It could happen at any time.’”

An obituary from the Portland Press Herald states that William Kendrick “passed away peacefully on 16 November, 2022 of natural causes with family by his side.” According to the obituary, the actor’s father served in the US Navy and spent time as a Federal Air Marshal.

“His thirst for knowledge made him an avid reader, and he especially loved world history,” it reads. “He enjoyed traveling, the outdoors, and the theater. He also had a broad and eclectic appreciation of music and studied several foreign languages.”

Kendrick’s father, William, and her mother, Janice, divorced when she was 15 years old. He later married his wife, Judith.

At the time of his passing, her brother posted a social media tribute to their father, which included throwback family photos featuring Kendrick. He captioned the post: “William King Kendrick 1946-2022. Rest In Peace Dad.”

During the podcast, Kendrick also revealed she began therapy three years ago, which helped her accept that there were “unspoken things” within her and her father’s relationship that they “both understood.”

Anna Kendrick has been open about her mental health journey, specifically about overcoming the “emotional abuse” of her past relationship. The actor recently starred in the drama Alice, Darling as the titular character who is trapped in an emotionally abusive relationship with her boyfriend, Simon (Charlie Carrick).

Speaking to People in September, Kendrick shared how the film’s script resonated with her in a “personal” way.

“Usually, it’s just I read a good script and I like the people involved, and I make the movie,” she explained. “And it was really surprising timing that we found this script at that moment in my life. I was coming out of a personal experience with emotional abuse and psychological abuse. I think my rep sent it to me, because he knew what I’d been dealing with and sent it along. Because he was like, ‘This sort of speaks to everything that you’ve been talking to me about.’”

She added that the script helped her “normalise and minimise” what was happening to her, because she thought, “‘Well, if I was in an abusive relationship, it would look like that.’”

“I was in a situation where I loved and trusted this person more than I trusted myself,” Kendrick said, without naming her ex-partner. “So when that person is telling you that you have a distorted sense of reality and that you are impossible and that all the stuff that you think is going on is not going on, your life gets really confusing really quickly. And I was in a situation where, at the end, I had the unique experience of finding out that everything I thought was going on was in fact going on. So I had this kind of springboard for feeling and recovery that a lot of people don’t get.”

“My body still believes that it was my fault,” she admitted. “So even with this concrete jumping-off point for me, to walk out of that relationship knowing that I wasn’t crazy, it’s incredible the way that recovery has been so challenging.”