INTO THE ABYSS

Heath Ledger’s Final Words In ‘Joker’ Diary: ‘Bye Bye’

HEATH LEDGER TRAGICALLY DIED FIVE YEARS AGO FROM A DRUG OVERDOSE, two months after he wrapped filming of The Dark Night for which he posthumously won a Best Support Actor Oscar.

Ledger’s haunting portrayal of the sociopathic Joker won rave reviews from the nation’s top critics. The New Yorkers David Denby called him “mesmerizing in every scene.” The Rolling Stones‘ Peter Travers gushed he was “mad-crazy-blazing brilliant as the Joker.”

But when he died in January, 2008, many speculated whether his “mad-crazy” portrayal contributed to his mental decline. Playing the role “disturbed”< Ledger, who called the character a “psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy.”

Now, in a brief clip from a German documentary series entitled Too Young To Die, Ledger’s father Kim reveals the visual diary that the actor kept while locked up in his hotel room while playing the character. “He liked to dive into his characters, but this time he really took it up a notch,” his father says.

“Clips of paper show depictions from comics, scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and clown faces.

And on the final page, Ledger had scribbled in large letters “Bye Bye.” His father tells the film crew: “It was hard to see this.”

Denby described Ledger’s Joker performance as “part freaky clown, part Alice Cooper the morning after, and all actor” in in 2008.

He continued: “As you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering — in a response that admittedly lies outside film criticism -how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way. His performance is a heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss.”