Vanity Fair: The Last Days of Heath

In the days leading up to his death, Heath Ledger battled chronic insomnia, pneumonia and exhaustion, according to reports in the August issue of Vanity Fair, on sale July 7.

Apparently, one of the biggest struggles in Ledger's life was his deteriorating relationship with partner Michelle Williams.

"Heath was always blaming himself [about the relationship], asking 'what did I do wrong?'" says Ledger's friend and mentor, director Terry Gilliam. He was overwhelmed by lawyers, and there were more and more of them, as if they were breeding."

Cinematographer Nicola Pecorini, who was working with Heath on his final film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, says Heath had taken himself off illicit drugs and alcohol.

" [He] used to smoke marijuana on a regular basis, like probably 50 percent of Americans." But once it became and issue, Heath "went clean as a whistle," Nicola said.

Vocal coach Gerry Grennell, who lived with Ledger during the filming of The Dark Knight, said he was much more concerned with Heath's insomnia. He said that the actor used sleeping medication to combat chronic insomnia.

"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,' " recalls Grennell, who said that Ledger would spend his nights finding ways to occupy himself, such as rearranging the furniture.

Grennell also says that everyone has a different view on how Ledger died. "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," he says. "I guess his body just stopped breathing."

Despite the actor's eventual success – and posthumous Oscar – as the Joker in the The Dark Knight, Ledger's friend and agent, Steven Alexander, tells the magazine that Ledger "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."

"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," his friend and agent, Steven Alexander revealed. "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."

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