Vanity Fair Claims Heath Ledger Was Married and Tried to Sabotage Role in ‘Dark Knight’
In the August issue of Vanity Fair, the magazine picks at the scab of Heath Ledger. Upon the recent plethora of celebrity loss, the mag once again digs at the actor. The cover features and old photo of Heath smiling and looking healthy with the bolded all capital letters claiming it’s recount of “Heath Ledger’s Final Days” while the spread inside depicts more happy photos of him with the title “The Last of Heath.”
Vanity Fair went back into his personal life and issues while reexamining what led to his death. Their first mistake was reopening a wound over a year old and their second was claiming Heath and Michelle Williams were married. Later, the mag edited and corrected their flubs mentioning their “failed marriage.”
Via Vanity Fair:
“Terry Gilliam—Ledger’s friend and mentor, and the director of Doctor Parnassus—agrees with Pecorini that the romance between Ledger and Williams began to unravel during the Oscar campaign for Brokeback Mountain. “The whole machinery started growing up around them,” Gilliam says. “That was the moment when it changed, when he realized, Uh-oh. We perceive the world differently. He didn’t care about things like those awards.”
According to Pecorini, “Heath was always blaming himself [about the relationship], asking, What did I do wrong?” Adds Gilliam, “Because he’s a much nicer person than I am, he really thought he could do the right thing. He was trying to be decent and graceful, give her whatever she wanted—the house, every fucking thing. But once it started going south, it went very quickly. He was overwhelmed by lawyers, and there were more and more of them, as if they were breeding. I said, ‘This is bullshit. Heath, just end it. Get out—it’s bad. You’ve got to just walk away from it.’ The stakes kept going up. He wouldn’t listen to any of us.”
As Ledger’s relationship with Williams unraveled, and the pair started dealing with lawyers and custody issues, according to Gilliam, Ledger fell apart. “The thing that really made Heath snap” was legal wrangling over his daughter, Matilda, Gilliam says. “He said, ‘Just f**k all of you! I’m not giving Michelle anything.’” Recalls another source, when it came to Matilda’s care, “there were definitely heated conversations, and emotions were high.” (Ledger’s lawyer declined to comment on any aspect of the separation or custody dispute.)”
To read more about Vanity Fair’s “Last Story of Heath” including allegations of insomnia and attempt to bail on his role as the Joker in “Dark Knight,” Click “Read More…” below.
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Images Via: VF
They based this article on the recollection of “friends” and “sources” close to him. A cinematographer who worked with him claims he was a marijuana fan but cleaned up just before “Dark Knight” and his old vocal coach said he even stopped drinking.
“Cinematographer Nicola Pecorini, who worked with Ledger on his last film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, says Ledger “used to smoke marijuana on a regular basis, like probably 50 percent of Americans.” But after it became an issue, Ledger “went clean as a whistle.” And vocal coach Gerry Grennell, who worked and lived with the actor during the filming of The Dark Knight, says Ledger even stopped drinking: “Heath would happily go to the bar, buy a round of drinks for friends, and come back and have a soda or juice, never once drinking alcohol.”
Of course they once again mentioned Ledger’s insomnia, which was a fact we already knew.
“Ledger’s use of sleeping medication to combat chronic insomnia at the end of his life was of more concern to Grennell. “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. It is very difficult for me to imagine how close he came to not taking them.”
Ledger would typically spend night after night awake, diverting himself with time killers, Biskind reports, such as re-arranging the furniture in whatever space he happened to be living in at the moment. Grennell coached him in the Alexander Technique, which helped him to sleep for a few hours at a time, but he still struggled.
“Everyone has a different view of how he passed away,” Grennell tells Biskind. “From my perspective, and knowing him as well as I did, and being around him as much as I was, it was a combination of exhaustion, sleeping medication … and perhaps the aftereffects of the flu. I guess his body just stopped breathing.”
Another “friend” of Ledger claimed that he didn’t really want to do the film “Dark Knight” and even went as far to say that he tried to sabotage his involvement.
“Ledger’s friend and agent, Steven Alexander, tells Biskind that Heath “was always hesitant to be in a summer blockbuster, with the dolls and action figures and everything else that comes with one of those movies. He was afraid it would define him and limit his choices.” According to friends of Ledger’s, one of the reasons he agreed to do Dark Knight was that the unusually long shoot would give him an excuse to turn down other offers.
Alexander tells Biskind that Ledger had a pay-or-play deal on The Dark Knight—meaning he’d get compensated no matter what—so he felt he had the freedom to do whatever he wanted as the Joker. According to Pecorini, Ledger hoped his performance would be so far-out he’d be fired, and thus become the beneficiary of a lengthy, paid vacation.
“He was ready to bust out of the gate, but he didn’t want to step on the gas and become something that he didn’t want to become: a matinee idol,” says Alexander. “He was a private person, and he didn’t want to share his personal history with the press. It just wasn’t up for sale. That’s part of the reason he initially tore down his career. He wasn’t motivated by money or stardom, but by the respect of his peers, and for people to walk out of a movie theater after they’d seen something that he’d worked on and say, ‘Wow, he really disappeared into that character.’ He was striving to become an ‘illusionist,’ as he called it, able to create characters that weren’t there.”
Wow. That is a slap in the face. I typically love Vanity Fair and I be but a humble blogger (I don’t know why I am pirate now), but this is riddled with BS and restates everything we already knew. Perhaps it is just terrible timing, but this is one issue I will skip.
This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 10:52 am and is filed under Celebrity Gossip, Celebrity Loss, Heath Ledger, Magazines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
