…Damn!
Just… Damn!
[Update…] Apparently initial autopsy results were inconclusive. But…look at this from Raw Story…
The actor’s personal strife was accompanied by professional anxiety.
Ledger said in an interview in November that "Dark Knight" and last year’s "I’m Not There," took a heavy toll. He said he "stressed out a little too much" during the Dylan film, and had trouble sleeping while portraying the Joker, whom he called a "psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy."
"Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night," Ledger told The New York Times. "I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going." He said he took two Ambien pills, which only worked for an hour.
Holy Crap! I had a prescription of Ambien once and just one of those things would slam me down flat all night and halfway into the next morning. And those things are horribly addictive (it took me a month and a half of slowly cutting the pills down smaller and smaller every night to ween myself off the stuff) and I swore afterward that I’d never touch the stuff again. And he was downing two at a time and they weren’t doing anything for him??? Wow. Just… Wow.
I don’t think most of us who only watch their performances up on the silver screen really appreciate how incredibly stressful that life is. They make it look easy and it isn’t.
January 22nd, 2008 at 6:17 pm
I’m really saddened to hear this.
January 23rd, 2008 at 12:50 am
Indeed. Isn’t that a pitiful shame?
If ever there might be a poster boy for avoiding serious drugs, it must certainly be Ledger.
January 23rd, 2008 at 8:18 am
Well, according to the Times there weren’t any illegal drugs found in the apartment with his body. There were some sleeping pills next to the bed and some prescription drugs in the bathroom and that was it. There was no sign he’d been drinking, which is an extremely dangerous thing to do with sleeping pills, and nothing like a suicide note to indicate he’d done it deliberately. According to the Times article, it seems he wasn’t a drinker at all. He’d broken up with his wife a little while ago and was in the apartment of a lady friend who was away…so you naturally wonder what his emotional state was. But it seems like this has caught everyone who knew him by complete surprise.
People obviously suspect the sleeping pills had something to do with it and that’s not unreasonable. Sleeping pills are dangerous things. I know because I had a bad experience with them once myself when I was prescribed Ambien for the insomnia I once had. Afterwards I swore I’d never touch them again. But we won’t know what it was that actually killed him until they do an autopsy.
Of course, perfectly healthy seeming people can have a bad reaction to some drugs that others can take without any problems at all. And sleeping pills are more dangerous then people realize, what with all those warm fuzzy feel good ads the pill companies are always running on TV. And doubly so if you take them with other medications.
January 23rd, 2008 at 3:43 pm
My initial response (after the initial “oh no!” had died down) was “bet the fundies will love this.”
I was right – and this is just sickening but so unsurprising to read:
http://www.transworldnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?id=34080&cat=2
January 23rd, 2008 at 5:27 pm
The Westboro Baptist Church will look for any excuse to parade in front of a camera. They’re a bunch of heartless assholes.
January 24th, 2008 at 6:57 am
Also-isn’t Heath Ledger from Australia? Most of his family still live there. What makes the Westboro goons think the funeral’s going to be held in the U.S.? If they want to shell out a fortune for the airfare, and endure the hours they’d have to spend sitting in a plane, during which time there’s a chance they’ll encounter somebody who might recognize them, in which case they’ll be trapped like the rats they are, possibly enduring some well-deserved verbal abuse…
now that I think about, that doesn’t sound so bad.
January 24th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Heh…someone on Fark.Com said that they may not have the money for airfare to Australia, and so they’d have to picket an Outback Steakhouse instead.
But…it isn’t only the Phelps’. Over at Pam’s House Blend there’s a post about John Gibson laughing and mocking Ledger’s death on Fox News…
Class act, isn’t he. It isn’t just the Phelps’. The kook pews will always hate Ledger for his powerful performance in Brokeback. Contrast that with the wonderful article on Ledger’s legacy and why gay folk are so moved by his death in the New York Times:
Yes.
January 24th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
I mourne Keith’s passing. And have yet another reason to hate Bill O’Reilly.
But I actually wanted to comment on Ambien. It does come in at least a couple of different dosages. The first time I used it, I had a 5 mg prescription. As far as I know, there were no adverse side effects, but I didn’t sleep through the night.
Next time I tried it, I was given a 10 mg prescription. This time, I did sleep through the night, but found on a couple of occasions that I’d gotten up in the middle of the night and cooked. With absolutely no memory of doing so. Scared me enough to swear off it for good.
To relate my experience to Keith Ledger, IF he was given a 5 mg presciption, he MIGHT have taken two with his doctor’s blessing.
January 25th, 2008 at 6:52 am
It’s HEATH, not Keith, and John Gibson, not Bill O’Reilly.
January 25th, 2008 at 9:12 am
Ayden: I had the 5mg prescription. Interestingly enough I had the same experience you had with Ambien with other sleep medications: none of them worked…I never really got any sleep with them. The Ambien knocked me flat. But I also noticed that I was having very vivid and strange dreams with it too, and now I wonder if I wasn’t doing things at night too, like you and others I’ve heard reports about. It’s scary. I’m single and live alone here at Casa del Garrett and there wouldn’t be anyone to tell me that I’d sleepwalked if I did.
A couple times during that period I’d discover that things had been moved around in the kitchen or my art room that I didn’t remember moving, and I just put it down to my chronic absent-mindedness. I found my tea kettle empty in the refrigerator one day and it freaked me out, because I’d Never put the tea kettle in the refrigerator. I started to worry about my memory then, because one other thing the Ambien was doing to me was making me fuzzy-headed during the day. That was the main reason I stopped taking it, because I work as a software developer and I can’t be fuzzy-headed and keep doing the work I do. But it didn’t occur to me that I was sleep walking because I hadn’t heard those reports of people sleep walking on Ambien then. Now I wonder. Yeah…that stuff is scary. I’ll never touch it again.
Yeah…we won’t know the situation with Ledger until the official report comes out. He could have been doing just what the doctor told him to do and it still happened. My experience getting my insomnia treated has caused me to loose a lot of faith in the U.S. health care system. As it turned out, all I needed to do was get my diet under control and loose a little weight and the insomnia went away. They threw sleeping pills at me instead. Oh…and my doctor wanted to prescribe Ritalin for the fuzzy-headedness the Ambien was causing me during the day. So…yet another pill. I just don’t trust doctors anymore. I suffered for almost a decade with really bad insomnia and all it would have taken to cure it was a better diet. And Ledger was, it seems, very stressed out from the work he’d been doing…and maybe his personal life too. The sense I get is that a life in the performing arts is a very stressful one. And for some reason their doctors just love to throw pills at them. Are actors over in Europe always getting into trouble with prescription drugs like they do over here?
Bill S: You know…actually it’s surprising me that there’s been no O’Reilly bile outburst over this yet.
January 26th, 2008 at 8:11 am
I guess even assholes need a day off. Or maybe he’s working really hard on it and isn’t finished yet.
What’d you think of Gibson’s "apology"? Seems to me he wasn’t sorry for saying stupid, offensive things-he was sorry that somebody NOTICED he said stupid, offensive things. And he also tried to claim it wasn’t meant to be homophobic, although his only reason for mocking Ledger’s death was the fact that he’d played a fictional gay character. It’s not like he used sound bites from "Monsters’ Ball", "I’m Not There", "The Patriot" , "10 things i Hate About You" , etc.
January 26th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Here are some of the reactions I’ve seen to the “apology” on a UK-based gay forum; I thought you might find them interesting.
That “apology” certainly came across as a lying pile of bullshit.
That vile idiot Gibson mocked Heath Ledger on the basis of his involvement in ‘Brokeback Mountain’, nothing else – giving the fact that Ledger is a) dead (and not exactly in a position to stand up for himself any longer), b) not gay (which makes the mockery somewhat ultra bigoted, since in the US you obviously only have to be associated with homosexuality in order to be vilified, which begs the question what the ‘mockery’ would have been like if Ledger HAD BEEN gay), makes all this cowardly and paranoid and pretty bad form – but what’s new on the US far right agenda? There is potentially more to be said about this, namely the effect all this might be having on Ledgers family and friends – no matter what angle you’re coming from, this episode was utterly despicable! And why is this relevant to us? Well, Europe might have moved on from this narrow minded bigotry to a great extent, but don’t kid yourselves, this can be reversed easily, even more so with the cultural impact the US is having on the rest of the world. Which is why – unless you’re living on a different planet – it is bloody relevant to all of us, right here, right now.
Well done to the gay activists, but it shouldn’t just be them protesting at that jerk’s remarks – everyone should be, and he should be taken off air.
Putting a positive spin on it – John Gibson has just told his entire radio audience that he’s an imbecile; that’s fine by me!
(edited a tad for clarity)
January 26th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Seems to me he wasn’t sorry for saying stupid, offensive things-he was sorry that somebody NOTICED he said stupid, offensive things.
That "apology" certainly came across as a lying pile of bullshit.
I absolutely agree with you both. An apology is "I’m sorry I said that", not "I’m sorry you were offended."