Heath Ledger
Heath Andrew Ledger (4 April 1979 – 22 January 2008) was an Australian actor. After playing roles in several Australian television and film productions during the 1990s, he moved to the United States in 1998 to further develop his film career. His work consisted of 20 films in a variety of genres, including 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), The Patriot (2000), A Knight's Tale (2001), Monster's Ball (2001), Casanova (2005), Lords of Dogtown (2005), Brokeback Mountain (2005), Candy (2006), I'm Not There (2007), The Dark Knight (2008), and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), the latter two of which were posthumously released.[1] He also produced and directed music videos and aspired to be a film director.[2]
Heath Ledger
22 January 2008 (aged 28)
- Actor
- music video director
1992–2008
Michelle Williams (2004–2007)
1
For his portrayal of Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, he received nominations for the BAFTA Award,[3] Screen Actors Guild Award, Golden Globe Award and the Academy Award for Best Actor, becoming the eighth-youngest nominee in the category at that time.[4] In 2007, he played a fictional actor, Robbie Clark, one of six characters embodying aspects of Bob Dylan's life and persona in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There.[5]
Ledger died in January 2008[6][4] from an accidental overdose as a result of prescription drug abuse.[7][8][9] A few months before his death, he finished filming his role as the Joker in The Dark Knight; the performance brought him universal acclaim and popularity, and numerous posthumous awards including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor, and the BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor.[10][3][11]
Early life and education
Ledger was born on 4 April 1979 in Perth, Western Australia, to Sally Ramshaw, a French teacher, and Kim Ledger, a racing car driver and mining engineer whose family established and owned the Ledger Engineering Foundry.[12] The Sir Frank Ledger Charitable Trust is named after his great-grandfather Frank Ledger.[12] He had English, Irish, and Scottish ancestry.[13] Ledger attended Mary's Mount Primary School in Gooseberry Hill,[14] and later Guildford Grammar School, where he had his first acting experiences, starring in a school production as Peter Pan at age ten.[4][12] His parents separated when he was ten and divorced when he was eleven.[15] Ledger's older sister Kate, an actress and later a publicist, to whom he was very close, inspired his acting on stage; and his love of Gene Kelly inspired his successful choreography, leading to Guildford Grammar's 60-member team's "first all-boy victory" at the Rock Eisteddfod Challenge.[12][16] Ledger's two half-sisters are Ashleigh Bell (b. 1990), his mother's daughter with her second husband Roger Bell; and Olivia Ledger (b. 1996), his father's daughter with his second wife Emma Brown.[17]
Acting career
1990s
After sitting for early graduation exams at age 16 to get his diploma, Ledger left school to pursue an acting career.[15] With Trevor DiCarlo, his best friend since the age of three, Ledger drove across Australia from Perth to Sydney, returning to Perth to take a small role in Clowning Around (1992), the first part of a two-part television series, and to work on the TV series Sweat (1996), in which he played a cyclist.[12] From 1993 to 1997, Ledger also had parts in the Perth television series Ship to Shore (1993); Ledger also had parts in the short-lived Fox Broadcasting Company fantasy-drama Roar (1997); in Home and Away (1997), one of Australia's most successful television shows; and in the Australian film Blackrock (1997), his feature film debut.[12] In 1999, he starred in the teen comedy 10 Things I Hate About You and in the acclaimed Australian crime film Two Hands, directed by Gregor Jordan.[12]
2000s
In the early 2000s, he starred in supporting roles as Gabriel Martin, the eldest son of Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson), in The Patriot (2000), and as Sonny Grotowski, the son of Hank Grotowski (Billy Bob Thornton), in Monster's Ball (2001); as well as leading or title roles in A Knight's Tale (2001), The Four Feathers (2002), The Order (2003), Ned Kelly (2003), Casanova (2005), The Brothers Grimm (2005), and Lords of Dogtown (2005).[18] In 2001, he won a ShoWest Award as "Male Star of Tomorrow".[19]
Ledger received "Best Actor of 2005" awards from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the San Francisco Film Critics Circle for his performance in Brokeback Mountain,[20][21] in which he plays Wyoming ranch hand Ennis Del Mar, who has a love affair with aspiring rodeo rider Jack Twist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal.[22] He also received the nominations for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor — Motion Picture Drama, a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role, a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, and an Academy Award for Best Actor for this performance,[23] making him, at age 26, the eighth-youngest nominee in the category.[24] In The New York Times review of the film, critic Stephen Holden writes: "Both Mr. Ledger and Mr. Gyllenhaal make this anguished love story physically palpable. Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn."[25] In a review in Rolling Stone, Peter Travers states: "Ledger's magnificent performance is an acting miracle. He seems to tear it from his insides. Ledger doesn't just know how Ennis moves, speaks and listens; he knows how he breathes. To see him inhale the scent of a shirt hanging in Jack's closet is to take measure of the pain of love lost."[26]
After Brokeback Mountain, Ledger costarred with fellow Australian Abbie Cornish in the 2006 Australian film Candy, an adaptation of the 1998 novel Candy: A Novel of Love and Addiction, as young heroin addicts in love attempting to break free of their addiction, whose mentor is played by Geoffrey Rush; for his performance as sometime poet Dan, Ledger was nominated for three "Best Actor" awards, including one of the Film Critics Circle of Australia Awards, which both Cornish and Rush won in their categories. Shortly after the release of Candy, Ledger was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.[27] As one of six actors embodying different aspects of the life of Bob Dylan in the 2007 film I'm Not There, directed by Todd Haynes, Ledger "won praise for his portrayal of 'Robbie [Clark],' a moody, counter-culture actor who represents the romanticist side of Dylan, but says accolades are never his motivation".[28] Posthumously, on 23 February 2008, he shared the 2007 Independent Spirit Robert Altman Award with the rest of the film's ensemble cast, its director, and its casting director.[29]
In his penultimate film role, Ledger played the Joker in Christopher Nolan's 2008 film The Dark Knight, which was released nearly six months after his death. While working on the film in London, Ledger told Sarah Lyall in their New York Times interview that he viewed The Dark Knight's Joker as a "psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy".[30] For his performance in The Dark Knight, Ledger posthumously won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor (becoming the fourth-youngest winner of the award) which his family accepted on his behalf, as well as numerous other posthumous awards, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor, which Nolan accepted for him.[31][32] At the time of his death on 22 January 2008, Ledger had completed about half of the work for his final film role as Tony in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.[33][34] Gilliam chose to adapt the film after his death by having fellow actors (and friends of Ledger) Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell play "fantasy transformations" of his character so that Ledger's final performance could be seen in theatres.[35]
Press controversies
Ledger's relationship with the Australian press was sometimes turbulent, and it led to his abandonment of plans for his family to reside part-time in Sydney.[69][70] In 2004, he strongly denied press reports alleging that "he spat at journalists on the Sydney set of the film Candy", or that one of his relatives had done so later, outside Ledger's Sydney home.[69][70] On 13 January 2006, "Several members of the paparazzi retaliated ... squirting Ledger and Williams with water pistols on the red carpet at the Sydney premiere of Brokeback Mountain".[71][72]
After his performance on stage at the 2005 Screen Actors Guild Awards, when he had giggled in presenting Brokeback Mountain as a nominee for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, the Los Angeles Times referred to his presentation as an "apparent gay spoof".[73] Ledger called the Times later and explained that his levity resulted from stage fright, saying that he had been told that he would be presenting the award only minutes earlier; he stated: "I am so sorry and I apologise for my nervousness. I would be absolutely horrified if my stage fright was misinterpreted as a lack of respect for the film, the topic and for the amazing filmmakers."[74][75]
After learning that two cinemas in Utah refused to show Brokeback Mountain, Ledger said: "I don't think the movie is [controversial] but I think maybe the Mormons in Utah do. I think it's hilarious and very immature of a society".[76] In the same interview with the Herald Sun newspaper, Ledger mistakenly claimed that lynchings had occurred in West Virginia as recently as the 1980s; state scholars disputed his statement, asserting that no documented lynchings had occurred in West Virginia since 1931.[77]
Health problems and drug use
In an interview with Sarah Lyall, published in The New York Times on 4 November 2007, Ledger stated that he often could not sleep when taking on roles, and that the role of the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008) was causing his usual insomnia: "Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night. ... I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going."[78] At that time, he told Lyall that he had taken two Ambien pills, after taking just one had not sufficed, and those left him in "a stupor, only to wake up an hour later, his mind still racing".[30]
Prior to his return to New York City from his last film assignment in London, in January 2008, while he was apparently suffering from some kind of respiratory illness, he reportedly complained to his The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus co-star Christopher Plummer that he was continuing to have difficulty sleeping and taking pills to help with that problem: "Confirming earlier reports that Ledger hadn't been feeling well on set, Plummer said: 'we all caught colds because we were shooting outside on horrible, damp nights. But Heath's went on and I don't think he dealt with it immediately with the antibiotics.... I think what he did have was the walking pneumonia.' [...] On top of that, 'He was saying all the time, 'dammit, I can't sleep'... and he was taking all these pills to help him'".[79]
Speaking to Interview magazine after Ledger's death, Michelle Williams confirmed reports that the actor had experienced trouble sleeping: "For as long as I'd known him, he had bouts with insomnia. He had too much energy. His mind was turning, turning, turning – always turning".[80]
Ledger was "widely reported to have struggled with substance abuse".[81] Following Ledger's death, Entertainment Tonight aired video footage from 2006 in which Ledger stated that he "used to smoke five joints a day for 20 years"[82][83] and news outlets reported that his drug abuse had prompted Williams to request that he move out of their apartment in Brooklyn.[84] Ledger's publicist asserted that reportage regarding Ledger's alleged drug use had been inaccurate.[82]