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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Jackson’s Autopsy Leaked; Results Shocking

The first autopsy on Michael Jackson completed by the L.A. County coroner has been leaked to the public, and the results reveal that the singer was “in a shocking state of decline.”

The leaked report suggests the King of Pop hadn’t eaten in some time, and had a cocktail of partially-digested pills in his stomach when he died. Jackson was so emaciated that he weighted just 51kg in the end, despite his height of 178cm, UK’s The Sun has reported.

There is proof of his addiction to narcotic painkillers as well, with the singer’s shoulders and thighs covered in needle marks from his three-times-daily injections. As well as the addiction scars, Jackson was also virtually bald, with little more than a “peach fuzz” covering a scalp.

The singer’s stomach was empty, save for the handful of partially dissolved pills he’d downed shortly before the painkiller injection that sent him into cardiac arrest on Thursday. His face was covered in scars from the numerous sessions under the knife, and the bridge of his infamously disfigured nose had caved in, the pathologist said.

There were also post-death injuries that Jackson suffered at the hands of his would-be rescuers: several broken ribs from the force of the CPR, and four injection wounds near his heart from failed attempts to inject adrenaline directly into the organ.

At this point in time, police have not named Dr. Conrad Murray – the cardiologist Jackson had hired just weeks ago and who was at the scene when the popstar died – as a suspect. They have announced his testimony didn’t “raise any red flags,” and have since turned their investigation towards Jackson’s access to prescription drugs.

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