Heath Ledger’s Shocking Death, 18 Years Later: Remembering the Actor’s Final Days and Lasting Legacy

Heath Ledger died as his career was reaching a fever pitch.

The actor, best known for a wide variety of film roles from the 1999 rom-com 10 Things I Hate About You to the 2005 drama Brokeback Mountain, won a posthumous Academy Award for his calculated yet chaotic performance as The Joker in the 2008 Batman superhero epic The Dark Knight.

On Jan. 22nd, 2008 — roughly six months prior to The Dark Knight’s release — Ledger was pronounced dead after an accidental overdose from combining sleeping pills with other prescription medications.

At the time of his death, Ledger had recently split from his girlfriend, actress Michelle Williams, with whom he shared a daughter, Matilda. Since his shocking death, Ledger’s family, friends and fans have continued honoring his legacy.

Here is everything to know about Heath Ledger’s death and the legacy he left behind.

How did Heath Ledger die?

Ledger was pronounced dead at 3:36 p.m. on Jan. 22, 2008, per The New York Times. His death was later ruled an accidental overdose as the result of acute intoxication.

“Mr. Heath Ledger died as the result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam, and doxylamine,” Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, said in a statement, according to The New York Times. “We have concluded that the manner of death is accident, resulting from the abuse of prescription medications.”

Ledger had been struggling physically and emotionally according to his friend and dialect coach Gerry Grennell, who lived with Ledger while he was working on what would be his final film. Grennell told PEOPLE about Ledger’s physical and emotional exhaustion as he dealt with a lingering pneumonia-like illness.

“He missed his family, he missed his little girl — he desperately wanted to see her and hold her and play with her … He was desperately unhappy, desperately sad,” Grennell claimed. “[Ledger] said, ‘I got to stop [taking the pills], it’s not helping. I’m not well, it’s making me feel more upset.’ ”

Who did Ledger speak to before he died?

Ledger had a few conversations the night before and day of his death, one of them being with his sister Kate, whom he usually spoke with multiple times a day. Kate had been warning Ledger of the dangers of mixing medications in the weeks prior to his death, but had an upbeat call with him the night before he died.

“I just said, ‘You’ve got to be very careful mixing things,’ and he was like, ‘Katie, hello, come on, of course,’ ” she told PEOPLE in April 2017. “I was cooking dinner … and we were laughing. Then he said, ‘I’ve got to go, and I’ll call you at 8:30 in the morning’ and that was it. That was our last conversation. I said ‘Okay, I love you.’ And that was it. It’s heartbreaking.”

Ledger spoke with his close friend and director Matt Amato the day he died in a similarly lighthearted conversation.

“We would communicate on iChat two or three times a day, so the last thing he said was, ‘I’m going out to buy some cigs.’ I said ‘figs,’ ” Amato told PEOPLE. “We were terrible at puns and we would make that as a running joke — terrible, terrible puns. He said cigs and I said figs and that was it.”

Ledger was reportedly planning to speak with Academy Award-winning director Steven Spielberg the following morning about a role as Thomas Hayden in The Chicago 7, per Entertainment Weekly.

What happened on the day of Ledger’s death?

At the time of Ledger’s death he was living in his New York apartment and filming The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. On Jan. 22, 2008, Ledger’s housekeeper and masseuse Diana Wolozin arrived at Ledger’s apartment and attempted to wake him up.

“She waited [outside his room] and tried calling him [on his cell phone] and he did not respond,” a police source told PEOPLE. “She went into the room. She started setting up the massage table and he wasn’t waking up — wasn’t responding.”

When she tried to awaken Ledger by shaking him and he didn’t respond, she went to the speed dial on his phone and called Full House actress Mary-Kate Olsen’s number. While Olsen contacted private security people in N.Y.C., Wolozin called 911. Paramedics arrived minutes later.

Did Ledger’s role as The Joker impact him off-screen?

Ledger was known to get deep into his roles, even isolating himself for weeks and keeping a journal in character to perfect The Joker’s demeanor for The Dark Knight. In 2005, he starred in the skateboarding film Lords of Dogtown and the director, Catherine Hardwicke, noticed Ledger’s dedication to his roles could get intense.

“Part of it is being an actor and getting so deep in your characters and trying to figure out your life,” Hardwicke told PEOPLE. “I remember talking to him during the award stuff for Brokeback Mountain and he was like, ‘I just want to move away to Holland and ride bicycles for a year — get away from all this craziness.’ ”

Ledger found himself unable to sleep and began taking sleeping pills while portraying The Joker, a character he described to The New York Times as “a psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy.” He also told The New York Times he only slept about two hours a night, saying “I couldn’t stop thinking … My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.”

A movie source who saw Ledger a week before he died told PEOPLE that “he didn’t look like himself. He looked like he was going through a hard time — it really looked like all the traveling and filming and the separation from Michelle and his child was really taking a toll.”

What was the public reaction to Ledger’s death?

On the night Ledger died, fans gathered outside both his Manhattan apartment and the home in Brooklyn he had shared with Williams.

Ledger’s death also reverberated throughout the most star-studded corners of Hollywood, leaving fellow actors shocked. Gary Oldman, who starred opposite Ledger as Commissioner James Gordon in The Dark Knight, spoke with PEOPLE about his admiration for the actor as both a person and father.

“[Ledger] would sit on the curbside … laugh and talk about his daughter Matilda [Rose],” Oldman said. “I thought he was just a beautiful kid. I thought he was just wonderful. I had a real affection for him.”

Daniel Day Lewis dedicated his 2008 Screen Actors Guild Award for There Will Be Blood to Ledger, saying he was inspired by his performances in Brokeback Mountain and Monster’s Ball. Williams also expressed her grief in a public statement nearly two weeks after Ledger’s passing.

“My heart is broken. I am the mother of the most tender-hearted, high-spirited, beautiful little girl who is the spitting image of her father. All that I can cling to is his presence inside her that reveals itself every day,” Williams said. “His family and I watch Matilda as she whispers to trees, hugs animals and takes steps two at a time, and we know that he is with us still … She will be brought up in the best memories of him.”

What is Ledger’s legacy?

Ledger will always be remembered by fans and his peers as a transcendent artistic talent who was able to perform a wide variety of roles.

Some of his most memorable include lovestruck teenager Patrick in the rom-com 10 Things I Hate About You, squire William in the medieval comedy A Knight’s Tale and his Oscar-nominated performance as cowboy Ennis in the 2005 Western romantic drama Brokeback Mountain. However, Ledger is best remembered for going from Hollywood sweetheart to The Joker in The Dark Knight.

Along with his performances and his daughter Matilda, Ledger also lives on through the Australians in Film Heath Ledger Scholarship. His sister, Kate, spoke with PEOPLE about how the scholarship provides full support for Australian actors like Heath to transition from their homeland to Hollywood.

“It’s designed to help Australian actors make their international career leap, sort of like a network to establish them in Hollywood and provide them with support and assistance,” Kate said in April 2017. “From industry introduction to managing finances to providing airfares back and forth to Australia, we aim to provide the complete transitional package.”