Heath Ledger’s friends have come forward with a recounting of his final days.
The Academy Award-winning actor was found dead in his New York City apartment in January 2008 from an accidental overdose of prescription medications, including painkillers, anti-anxiety medication, and sleeping pills.
The tragic event occurred shortly after he finished filming his acclaimed role as the Joker in The Dark Knight. After he wrapped shooting, the actor fell into a deep state of sadness. Health’s friend and dialect coach Gerry Grennell, who lived and worked with the star in the final weeks of his life, said it had begun when he started to work on The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
While speaking to People, Gerry recalled the actor being “exhausted, emotionally and physically” while battling a pneumonia-type illness. Even with taking sleeping pills, the sickness robbed him of rest.
“I would hear him wandering around the apartment, and I’d get up and say, ‘Come on, man, get back to bed, you have to work tomorrow,’” he remembered. “He said, ‘I can’t sleep, man.’”
Along with the lingering illness, Heath was also struggling with being away from his daughter, Matilda, and former girlfriend, Michelle Williams, whom he had split with just months before the overdose.
“He missed his girl, he missed his family, he missed his little girl — he desperately wanted to see her and hold her and play with her,” he added. “He was desperately unhappy, desperately sad.”
The actor was aware he wasn’t in a good state; however, he kept resorting to the pills.
“He said, ‘I got to stop, it’s not helping, I’m not well, it’s making me feel more upset,’” Gerry said. “It wasn’t helping with the relationship issues, it wasn’t helping with missing his kid, it wasn’t helping his sleeping — and he knew that.”
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During Spike TV’s I Am Heath Ledger documentary, his The Four Feathers co-star Djimon Hounsou also recalled his final moments with the actor.
He said, “I ran into him in New York, hadn’t seen him for a couple of years, and [thought], ‘Wow, Heath has this change.’ But the way he has changed kind of got me a little concerned, you know. And I looked at him, I thought, ‘Wow,’ with a bit of concern, you know?”
The only ones who remember a less gloomy Heath in his final days are his family, with his sister Kate recalling him as a “happy boy” when they would speak every day.
She described their last phone call as cheerful, recalling, “I was cooking dinner … and we were laughing. Then he said, ‘I’ve got to go, and I’ll call you at 8:30 in the morning,’ and that was it. That was our last conversation. I said ‘Okay, I love you.’ And that was it.”
