If, like ours, your heart is still hurting after a first watch of the upcoming Spike TV / Network Entertainment doco ‘I Am Heath Ledger’ – built around a number of home movies he filmed both before and during the Aussie star’s meteoric rise to fame – then you might want to click out of this story.
Ahead of the film’s release, family and friends have opened up about Heath’s mental state weeks before his death from a fatal mix of prescription drugs and sleeping pills on January 22, 2008 – and it paints a bleak picture.
Gerry Grennell, a dialect coach who lived and worked with him while he was shooting The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, told PEOPLE he was “exhausted, emotionally and physically” from fighting a pneumonia-type illness that wouldn’t let up.
He would apparently stay up for hours on end, talking about how badly he missed former girlfriend Michelle Williams and their then-two-year-old daughter, Matilda.
“I would hear him wandering around the apartment and I’d get up and say, ‘Come on, man, get back to bed, you have to work tomorrow,’” Grennell said. “He said, ‘I can’t sleep, man.’”
“He missed his girl, he missed his family, he missed his little girl – he desperately wanted to see her and hold her and play with he. He was desperately unhappy, desperately sad.”
Grennell said Heath knew the sleeping pills he kept taking weren’t doing him any good, but couldn’t stop.
“He said, ‘I got to stop, it’s not helping, I’m not well, it’s making me feel more upset’. It wasn’t helping with the relationship issues, it wasn’t helping with missing his kid, it wasn’t helping his sleeping – and he knew that.”
His sister Kate told PEOPLE she and her family view the documentary as a gift to Matilda, who’s now 11 years old and the spitting image of her dad (dimples and all).
“You can tell her about things, but with her being able to visually see his movement and his expressions, it’s almost like he had actually filmed the documentary himself and pieced it together for her.”
