Inside Heath Ledger's Sleepless Nights
New York's Washington Square Park is sometimes a haven for the stray homeless to get some shut-eye, curled up on a bench somewhere. For Heath Ledger, it was a place to roam while sleep evaded him.
"He would walk early in the morning – around 6:30 a.m. or 7," says retired city-worker Tony Rivera, 52, who walks his dog in the park each day at that time, "because, he said, he always had trouble sleeping. That's why he'd come out so early in the morning."
Once in a while, Ledger, 28, would watch the early-morning chess players in action – sometimes even joining them. He often talked about his daughter, says Rivera, who struck up a chat with the actor during one of his sleepless strolls. "He said it was a great thing, being a dad."
But Ledger's friendly banter with park locals was always punctuated by one recurring complaint: "He'd say, 'I'm very tired,' " Rivera recalls, "and he looked it."
Ledger, the type of actor who immersed himself in his film roles, spoke in a recent interview about how work-related stress gave him insomnia. During the shooting of his last completed film, The Dark Knight, Ledger told The New York Times in November that he often took the prescribed sleeping aid, Ambien, in an attempt to coax himself into a slumber.
"Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night," he told The Times. "I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted and my mind was still going." Ledger continued to say that taking one pill had no effect on him. He'd have to take second to fall asleep, only to awake an hour later with his "mind still racing."
She couldn't possibly assess how serious a condition he was in.
I would hate to hear people say if the masseus or MK called 911 first, Heath would be alive today or the situation would be different. It's awful already!
