Death of Heath Ledger. RIP.

As superficial and silly as it may seem, the death of actor Heath Ledger seems to have struck a major chord with me - and with many of my friends as well. I've had a crush on him since his days as the bad boy in 10 Things I Hate About You. His talent as an actor really developed - he seemed to be a real actor's actor.

Everyone I've talked to thought he had it together - he seemed to have maintained a some sense of normalcy and decent family values, at least for a time. Fame appeared to have not fazed him. He and Michelle Williams used to live not too far from me right here in Brooklyn. Now some reports are alleging that he was freebasing, or perhaps overdosed on pills.

This excerpt below from the New York Times convinces me that his death was accidental - maybe just a tortured man trying to finally get a good night's sleep.



“I stressed out a little too much,” Mr. Ledger said.

He tends to do that. He is here in London filming the latest episode of the “Batman”franchise, “The Dark Knight.” (Mr. Bale, as it happens, plays Batman; Mr. Ledger plays the Joker.) It is a physically and mentally draining role — his Joker is a “psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy” he said cheerfully — and, as often happens when he throws himself into a part, he is not sleeping much.

“Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night,” he said. “I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.” One night he took an Ambien, which failed to work. He took a second one and fell into a stupor, only to wake up an hour later, his mind still racing.

Even as he spoke, Mr. Ledger was hard-pressed to keep still. He got up and poured more coffee. He stepped outside into the courtyard and smoked a cigarette. He shook his hair out from under its hood, put a rubber band around it, took out the rubber band, put on a hat, took off the hat, put the hood back up. He went outside and had another cigarette. Polite and charming, he nonetheless gave off the sense that the last thing he wanted to do was delve deep into himself for public consumption. “It can be a little distressing to have to overintellectualize yourself,” is how he put it, a little apologetically.




So sad to have left that beautiful baby daughter behind - and at only 28.