Heath Ledger, photographed exclusively for Vanity Fair by Bruce Weber in 2000, on the Prague set of A Knight’s Tale. “The day I stop having fun,” he told Kevin Sessums for the August 2000 cover story, “I’ll just walk away. There’s so much more I want to discover.”

Heath Ledger’s final days are chronicled in Peter Biskind’s cover story, “The Last of Heath,” in the August 2009 issue of Vanity Fair, on NY/LA stands July 1 and nationally July 7.

“[Heath] was ready to bust out of the gate, but he didn’t want to step on the gas and become something that he didn’t want to become: a matinee idol,” Heath’s friend and agent, Steven Alexander, told Vanity Fair. “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. 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.”

Check out the full article at VanityFair.com.