Friends now say, 'Custody battle over his BASTARD made Heath Ledger snap!'
Ben Burleson
Custody Battle 'Made Heath Ledger Snap'
PopEater
New light has been shed on Heath Ledger's last days. The actor's
mentor Terry Gilliam told Vanity Fair that as the romance between
Ledger and Michelle Williams began to unravel, it was the custody
battle "that really made Heath snap."
In the August issue of Vanity Fair, Heath Ledger's friends and
colleagues give insight to the actor's life and final days.
"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 [Williams] whatever she wanted--the house, every f***ing 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," Gilliam said.
Despite friends' advice to end things with Williams, Ledger wouldn't
listen. "I said, 'This is bulls***. 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," Gilliam added.
'The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus' cinematographer Nicola Pecorin
saw that Ledger was devoted to keeping his daughter safe and did
everything he could to stay together with Williams -- even though he
slowly started to unravel. "Heath was always blaming himself, asking,
'What did I do wrong?,'" Percorin said.
In her first statement after Heath's death, Michelle Williams was
quite accurate when she called their daughter Matilda (seen here in
August 2008) "the spitting image of her father." Williams went on to
say her heart was "broken," but together she and Heath created "the
most tender-hearted, high-spirited, beautiful little girl."
In the same statement, Williams said: "All that I can cling to is his
presence inside her that reveals itself every day. His family and I
watch Matilda as she whispers to trees, hugs animals, and takes steps
two at a time, and we know that he is with us still."
Williams and Matilda continue to live in New York, where they've lived
since Matilda was born.
Speaking to Newsday in November, Williams opened up about how she's
handled Heath's death. "I just wake up each day in a slightly
different place-grief is like a moving river, so that's what I mean by
'it's always changing'."
In the Newsday interview, Williams teared up before saying: "It's a
strange thing to say because I'm at heart an optimistic person, but I
would say in some ways it just gets worse. It's just that the more
time that passes, the more you miss someone. In some ways it gets
worse. That's what I would say."
In an Interview magazine article, Williams said that Heath "had
uncontrollable energy. He buzzed ... His mind was turning, turning,
turning -- always turning."
"Everyone has a different view of how he passed away. 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." -- Gerry Grennell, a vocal coach who worked and
lived with Ledger during the filming of 'The Dark Knight'
Why Ledger tried to tear down his career:
"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. 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." -- Steven
Alexander, Ledger's agent
His pure devotion for his career:
"He would arrive in the morning completely knackered. By the end of
the day he was beaming, glowing with energy. It was like everything
was put into the work, because that was the joy; that's what he loved
to do. The words were just pouring out. It was like he was
channeling." -- Terry Gilliam, the director of 'The Imaginarium of
Doctor Parnassus'
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2009-06-29 15:08:17