Ledger’s Colleagues Speak About Actor’s Last Days

In the wake of pop superstar Michael Jackson’s death, professionals closest to the late Australian actor Heath Ledger have revealed how the star “battled with fame, a failed relationship and insomnia” in the days leading up to his tragic death in 2008.

Gerry Grennell, a vocals coach who worked and lived with Ledger during the filming of one of his last movies, The Dark Knight, has said that while the actor didn’t drink alcohol “once” during that period, the level of his sleeping pill consumption “was a concern.”

“I’d say: ‘If you can possibly bear it to stop taking the medications, do, because they don’t seem to be doing you any good’ – he agreed,” Grennell told Vanity Fair magazine.

“It is very difficult for me to imagine how close he came to not taking them.”

Ledger died in January of last year from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs, including a host of sleeping medications, in his New York apartment at the age of 28.

Grennell believes that the sleeping medication – taken for the actor’s incurable insomnia – played a huge part in his shock death.

“[Ledger's death] was a combination of exhaustion, sleeping medication… and perhaps the after-effects of the flu,” the vocals coach said.

Nicola Pecorin, a cinematographer who worked with Ledger on the film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, admitted that the young actor had “dabbled” in narcotics but soon dropped the habit.

“He used to smoke marijuana on a regular basis,” she said, “like probably 50 per cent of Amercians [but Ledger] went clean as a whistle.”

Close friend and agent Steven Alexander said that around the time of his death, Ledger was quite concerned that his role in the “summer blockbuster” The Dark Knight would typecast him and turn him into a “matinee idol,” something the young star had never wanted to become.

“He wasn’t motivated by money or stardom but by the respect of his peers [and moviegoers],” Alexander explained.

“He was striving to become an ‘illusionist’ as he called it – able to create characters that weren’t there.”

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