Heath Ledger’s father is opening up about his son’s unfortunate death. Kim Ledger talked to Daily Mail Australia about Heath’s accidental overdose in 2008, admitting that he believes it was his son’s own fault.
“It was totally his fault. It was no one else’s. He reached for them. He put them in his system. You can’t blame anyone else in that situation,” Kim said. “That’s hard to accept because I loved him so much and was so proud of him.”
Heath died after mixing painkillers and sleeping pills in his New York apartment in January 2008. Kim says that Heath’s sister Katie attempted to warn her brother of the dangerous mix.
“His sister was on the phone to him the night before telling him not to take the prescription medications with the sleeping tablets,” he said. “He said, ‘Katie, Katie, I’m fine. I know what I’m doing.’ He would have had no idea.”
Kim points to Heath’s loaded schedule and the constant responsibilities of fame for preventing him from receiving proper medical attention for whatever ailments he may have had.
“Because he was traveling a lot, he would pop in to a doctor. In the case of someone with a higher profile it’s often a case of ‘what do you want’ instead of ‘what do you need,'” he said.
“There’s so much pressure on them to perform so even though your body is telling you that it’s not good and needs time, it’s like ‘just take these painkillers and keep going,” he said. “That was the case with Heath. He had to be back on set to finish [the next day]. They were doing night shoots in the freezing cold and he had a weak chest anyway. He’d caught this [cough] and just couldn’t shake it but he thought he had to because he wanted to get the movie done.”
Kim has been very forthcoming about his son since his death, particularly after Heath was awarded a posthumous Oscar for his role as The Joker in “The Dark Knight.”
“Bittersweet is probably the best way I can describe that night. It was only a year and a month since his passing. We hadn’t got our heads around the tragedy of losing him, but at the same time, he was receiving such accolades for what he knew was his best work.”