Heath Ledger dead at 28

Or maybe he didn't have a decent physician.

As someone else said, I think Farmerman, there can be synergistic action between a given drug and alcohol. Thinking... Dorothy Kilgallen(?).

It happens every day. Doctors don't write prescriptions for one day's worth of medication at a time.

There's enough medication in many prescriptions to kill people if they're not used in the correct way. Whether someone deliberately uses too much of something, or uses the wrong amount at the wrong time, or there is an interaction with another medication - there are any number of ways that the right medication from a good doctor can kill someone.

My experience is that doctors have little cross referencing in any kind of computer system to pick up on drug comparison to avoid a synergy. If, for instance, one is able to get one from a free clinic, it seldom shows up in the physicians internet database. Going to different pharmacists also gets them mixed up. Anyone who is able to locate and deal with a street drug dealer is more than adept at getting presciptions. They doctor has to trust you, and this could have been tricky for the actor if any of the doctors reads tabloids. Doctors will offer drugs if one is convincing them that they are recovering from alcohol abuse, mostly Wellburtin to keep up the dopamine levels in the blood (and brain) and Adivan or Lorazepam for the anxiety. Unfortunately, the mood elevators can get some people manic and subject to really serious panic attacks (which often feels like a heart attack, especially if the stomach is upset and there is acid reflux problems).

The pharmacies, especially the chain pharmacies, have a computer check of interaction and flags the drugs in question. But if you get familiar with the pharmicist were you always pick up the meds, they don't check as closely as they should.

One bottle of even 20 left out of 30 10mg of Ambien, espcially used with alcohol or another downer, can most certainly stop you heart depending on your health. Almost any controlled substance prescription in a thirty day supply is enough to kill you.

Mixing Soloft, Valium and Ambien is a cocktail of the devil.

It's on every prescriptions in the initial never to take more than the amount shown in the time frame prescribed unless the physicians recommends it.

So he didn't reply to your love letters, is what you're saying? You were spurned? Hence the vitriol?

Loud and clear!

Those grapes can be so sour that it causes one to pucker. Hey, at least there's nobody here who wants to kiss you.

As if Ledger had arranged some pre-planned adoration in case of his death.

A. O. Scott, film critic for the New York Times on Heath Ledger:

The defining performance of Heath Ledger's tragically foreshortened career ?- more or less equivalent to what Jim Stark in "Rebel Without a Cause" was for James Dean ?- will surely be the role of Ennis Del Mar in "Brokeback Mountain."

A portrait of inarticulate love and thwarted desire, Ennis is a rich, complicated character succinctly sketched in Annie Proulx's original short story and brought to heartbreaking life by the film's screenwriters, Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry; by its director, Ang Lee; and above all by Mr. Ledger himself.

Outwardly, Ennis presents a familiar image of rough-hewn Western masculinity, and the longing that surges under his taciturn demeanor does not so much contradict this image as help to explain it. Ennis's love for Jack Twist, whom he meets tending sheep on a Wyoming mountaintop in the early 1960s, takes Ennis by surprise and throws him permanently off balance. His lifelong silence, the film suggests, is less a sign of strength than of cowardice, a crippling inability to acknowledge or communicate the truth of his own feelings.

What made the performance so remarkable was that Mr. Ledger, without betraying Ennis's dignity or his reserve, was nonetheless able to convey that truth to the audience. This kind of sensitivity ?- the ability to signal an inner emotional state without overtly showing it ?- is what distinguishes great screen acting from movie-star posing. And while Mr. Ledger was handsome enough, and famous enough, to be called a movie star, he was serious enough, and smart enough, to be suspicious of deploying his charisma too easily or cheaply.

In retrospect the best thing that happened to him ?- the lucky break for his admirers, at any rate ?-may have been his disinclination to realize his apparent movie-star potential. He was the most likable of the young things in the "Taming of the Shrew"-derived teenage comedy "10 Things I Hate About You," with his curly hair, high forehead and the permanent intimation of a smirk on his thin-lipped, angled mouth. And as often happens with young actors in Hollywood, his good looks and easy charm looked like a ticket to the commercial big time. Dutifully, but also with sparks of playful, eager energy, he played period golden boys in "The Patriot" and "A Knight's Tale," a misbegotten (but not entirely unenjoyable) entry in the ever-silly costume-action genre.

It is hard to know exactly when Mr. Ledger discovered his range, and set about trying to explore it, but it is clear that he covered a lot of ground in a very short time. He had a taste for portraying troubled, brooding, self-destructive young men, it's true ?- the anguished third-generation prison guard in "Monster's Ball," the heroin addict in "Candy," the unhappy film star in "I'm Not There," in addition to Ennis ?- but the temptation to blend their fates with Mr. Ledger's own should be resisted at all costs. Those roles should be seen less as expressions of some imagined inner torment than as evidence of resourcefulness, creative restlessness and wit.

Those same characteristics are abundantly evident in less well-known movies that should not be overlooked. Mr. Ledger was hilarious and eccentric in Catherine Hardwicke's "Lords of Dogtown," playing a shaggy old-timer on the Venice Beach surf-and skateboard scene, and affably mischievous in Terry Gilliam's "Brothers Grimm," alongside Matt Damon.

Ennis Del Mar is complemented and complicated by Casanova, whom Mr. Ledger played in Lasse Hallstrom's unfairly neglected biopic-as-sex-farce, which came and went too quickly in late 2005, during the ascendancy of "Brokeback Mountain." It's not just that the flamboyantly heterosexual Casanova is Ennis Del Mar's opposite in obvious ways. He is also a creature of pure whimsy, a lighter-than-air confection of licentiousness and gallantry.

Which is not to say that Mr. Ledger's performance is frivolous. Rather it required intelligence, restraint and a tricky lightness of touch. Mr. Ledger had an unusual ability to mix lightness and gravity, an emotional nimbleness he displayed most fully in Todd Haynes's "I'm Not There." Of the six avatars of Bob Dylan in that film, his, an actor named Robbie Clark, is the most remote from Mr. Dylan's various personae and closest to the prosaic world of love, fame and ambition. Robbie starts out full of youthful energy, heedless and in love, and finds himself a decade later adrift and disappointed, robbed of the happiness that early success had seemed to promise.

Again, it's important to warn against looking in that film or any other for clues or portents. It seems to me that Mr. Ledger, in his choice of roles, was motivated above all by curiosity, and perhaps also by an impatience with the predictability and caution that can settle around the shoulders of talented young stars. In heroic roles like "A Knight's Tale" or "Ned Kelly" he often seems bored, which may be why he so eagerly seized the chance to play the sociopathic Joker in "The Dark Knight," the next installment in the "Batman" franchise.

The dismaying sense of loss and waste at Mr. Ledger's death at 28 comes not only because he was so young, but also because his talent was large and as yet largely unmapped. It seems inevitable that he will now be inscribed in the cult of the beautiful stars who died too young, alongside James Dean, Montgomery Clift and Marilyn Monroe. Even before his death he had been ensnared in a pathological gossip culture that chews up the private lives of celebrities, and Tuesday's news unleashed the usual rituals of media cannibalism.

Mr. Ledger's work will outlast the frenzy. But there should have been more. Instead of being preserved as a young star eclipsed in his prime, he should have had time to outgrow his early promise and become the strange, surprising, era-defining actor he always had the potential to be.

Yep.

For god's sake, get a grip, Wilso.

Gilliam never made a bad movie but he's made just average Gilliam movies.

I could have seen Ledger in "12 Monkeys" in the Brad Pitt role and been just as satisfied.

Ledger's final scenes in "Brokeback Mountain" is the stuff of movie history -- all the genuine emotion from an actor who was playing a character perhaps not completely alien from his own life. Ennis might just outlive Heath.

What does that mean?

Introverted and secretive -- not what you might be thinking. I never considered that but Jack Nicholson stated he was fighting demons. That film could bring the genie out of the bottle. At least I'd rather think of it as a genie rather than a demon.

That's a ridiculous statement. A few years back my sane, happy father underwent some medical treatment that required he take three kinds of medication. He was also on a standard sleeping pill that sometimes made him a little disoriented when he first woke up. One morning he accidentally took one of the medications twice thinking he was taking the three different pills. He started to have serious heart palpitations and end up in the hospital.
People who take drugs on regular basis often lose count and make mistakes without meaning to. I also don't think every who has ever died from a heroin overdose was thinking "this is the last one for me".

Boy, you're hostile.

Why don't you use some of your vitriol to feel sad about the 28 yr. olds who die in Iraq? Or is a young man/woman enlisting in the war a form of suicide too? therefore, distasteful in your high and mighty opinion.

So the latest is Ambien & Zopiclone (sleeping pills) Zoloft (ant-depressant) Xanax, Valium (anti-anxiety) and Donormyl (anti-histamine)

and the guy had pneumonia. Recipe for disaster. Really sad for his little girl.

Just abruptly stopping the Zoloft and taking even one of each of those downers is a recipe for disaster.

This has to be innocent until proven guilty, not guilty of premeditated suicide until proven it was not. Of course, accidental overdoses are not intangible and not recognizing the synergy of mixing drugs is not at all uncommon. It's not always fatal if someone responds in time and medical care gets to the person in time.

Both Zoloft and Xanax have serious withdrawal effects.

Is Xanax a prescription only durg? I've only ever heard of it mentioned in American telly or films. What is the UK equivalent?

It's in the same family as Valium:

Generic Name: alprazolam

Brand Names: Niravam, Xanax, Xanax XR

It's not uncommon to prescribe these anti-anxiety drugs with any mood elevator drug as a side-effect to nearly all of them is agitation and sleeplessness (!). Panic attacks are rare with all of the mood elevators depending on one's physiology, including all brain chemical imbalances.

This combination with the sleeping pills is taking an upper to be up and "happy" and then taking a downer to calm down when one over-reacts.

I've always been against General Practitioners, Internal Medicine and all other MD's who are not psychiatrist dispensing these drugs like candy. Prozac and Paxil are now the two most prescribed drugs in the US. Wellbutrin or Budeprion (generic) is a better choice for, but not only, long term withdrawal from alcohol abuse, or any drug that boosts dopamine levels, such as crystal meth. It is far less troublesome and MD's should be able to prescribe it.

Okay, the site spam filter wiped that out so do a Google search for Xanax and it will bring up drugs.com at the top.

That's a pretty dumb name for a drug. I'd fire everyone in the marketing department that came up with that one.

I'll try to past the generic name again:

Generic:alprazolam

Won't work -- you will have to Google Xanax as directed and get the generic name. Don't ask me why the filter hit the generic name and not Xanax(????)