Heath Ledger

Heath Ledger: The Actor Who Refused a Signature

In November 2007 Heath Ledger described the character he had just finished shooting to a New York Times reporter as "a psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy." In the same conversation he mentioned sleeping roughly two hours a night, taking Ambien, waking an hour later with his mind still going. Two months later he was dead at twenty-eight. Thirteen months after that, his family walked onto a Hollywood stage to collect an Academy Award he never knew he had won.

Perth, and the Door Marked Exit

Heath Andrew Ledger was born on 4 April 1979 in Perth, Western Australia, to Sally Ramshaw, a French teacher, and Kim Ledger, a racing driver and mining engineer whose family owned the Ledger Engineering Foundry. His parents separated when he was ten and divorced a year later. His older sister Kate, an actress and publicist, pushed him toward the stage; at ten he played Peter Pan at Mary's Mount Primary in Gooseberry Hill. He went on to Guildford Grammar School and then did something few sixteen-year-olds do: sat early graduation exams, took his diploma, and left. He drove across the continent with a childhood friend and, by seventeen, was in Sydney looking for work.

What he found was the standard Australian apprenticeship: the children's series *Ship to Shore*, the cycling drama *Sweat*, the Fox fantasy series *Roar*, a stint on *Home and Away*, and a feature debut in *Blackrock* in 1997. None of it suggested what was coming.

The Heartthrob Trap, Declined

*10 Things I Hate About You* made him a face in 1999; the same year, Gregor Jordan's *Two Hands* showed something harder underneath. Hollywood offered him the obvious contract — teen idol, indefinitely renewable — and he spent six years refusing it. He fought in the American Revolution in *The Patriot*, played a corrections officer wrestling with inherited racism in *Monster's Ball*, jousted in *A Knight's Tale*, misfired in *The Order* and *Ned Kelly*. In 2001 ShoWest named him Male Star of Tomorrow, an award that now reads like an accusation.

His explanation was blunt. "Some people find their shtick," he said. "I never figured out who 'Heath Ledger' is on film: 'This is what you expect when you hire me, and it will be recognisable.'" Elsewhere: "I feel like I am wasting my time if I repeat myself."

Ennis Del Mar, and the Discovery of Withholding

Ang Lee's *Brokeback Mountain* arrived in 2005 and rearranged his career. As Ennis Del Mar, the Wyoming ranch hand whose voice barely escapes his jaw, Ledger built a performance out of refusal — clenched, monosyllabic, folded in on itself. Stephen Holden of the New York Times wrote that Ledger "magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character," calling it "a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn." Rolling Stone's Peter Travers called it "an acting miracle," adding that Ledger "seems to tear it from his insides." The New York and San Francisco critics circles named him best actor of the year; the Academy nominated him at twenty-six, the eighth-youngest Best Actor nominee in its history.

He kept moving: a poet sliding into heroin addiction in *Candy* (2006), then one of six actors dividing Bob Dylan between them in Todd Haynes's *I'm Not There* (2007). Haynes compared his presence to James Dean's and singled out a "precocious seriousness."

The Joker

For Christopher Nolan's *The Dark Knight*, Ledger took a character with a long performance history and threw the history away: the lolling tongue, the scarred smile, the nurse's uniform, the pencil. What critics registered was not camp but menace. David Denby called it "sinister and frightening" and "mesmerizing in every scene," concluding that "this young actor looked into the abyss." Nolan said afterward: "I've never felt as old as I did watching Heath explore his talents."

Ledger called the shoot "the most fun I've ever had, or probably ever will have, playing a character." Terry Gilliam, who directed him afterward, has been emphatic in rejecting the folklore that the role broke him: "Heath was so solid. His feet were on the ground and he was the least neurotic person I've ever met."

Broome Street

On 22 January 2008 Ledger was found unresponsive in his loft at 421 Broome Street in SoHo by his housekeeper and his masseuse. Paramedics could not revive him; he was pronounced dead at 3:36 p.m. On 6 February the New York medical examiner reported that he had died "as the result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine," ruling the death accidental, "resulting from the abuse of prescribed medications."

He had lived with insomnia for years. "For as long as I'd known him, he had bouts with insomnia," Michelle Williams said. "He had too much energy. His mind was turning, turning, turning — always turning." Williams, whom he met on *Brokeback Mountain*, was the mother of his daughter Matilda Rose, born in October 2005; they had separated in September 2007. Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, called it tragic to lose "one of our nation's finest actors in the prime of his life."

The Career He Didn't Get To

Acting was, by his own account, an interim arrangement. He founded a production company, The Masses, and a record label with Ben Harper, and directed music videos for the hip-hop artist N'fa, for Harper, for Modest Mouse and for Grace Woodroofe. He wanted to make a documentary about Nick Drake. And he was developing Walter Tevis's chess novel *The Queen's Gambit* as his directing debut — apt, since he had played tournaments as a boy and haunted the boards in Washington Square Park.

Why Heath Is Called a Genius

The word attaches to Ledger on the strength of two performances, and the honest case rests on one unusual capacity: he could construct a whole interior life and then decline to show most of it. Ennis Del Mar and the Joker are opposite exercises — one starved of expression, one drowning in it — and both work because the actor knew exactly how much to withhold. Holden's comparison to Brando and Penn, and Denby's line about looking into the abyss, are judgments critics normally reserve for whole careers rather than single roles.

But it is craft, not intellect, and the distinction matters. Ledger's gift was physical and imaginative: an ability to reorganise his own body, voice and rhythm around another person's psychology, plus the nerve to abandon what an audience expects. That is not invention in the scientific sense, and calling it genius risks the sentimentality that gathers around an early death. The counter-case is real. His filmography holds genuine misfires — *The Order*, *Ned Kelly*, *The Four Feathers* — and stops before it could prove itself across decades. He was allergic to the compliment himself: "there's no such thing as perfection in what actors do," he said, and "the day I say, 'It's good' is the day I should start doing something else." The defensible verdict is that he had an extraordinary instrument and extraordinary discipline, and died before anyone learned what he would do with a full career.

Afterward

Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell each stepped into Ledger's unfinished role in *The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus* so his last performance could reach cinemas, and donated their fees to Matilda. In 2009 he became the second person after Peter Finch to win a posthumous acting Oscar, and the first performer in a comic-book film to win an acting Academy Award at all; the statuette is held in trust for his daughter. In 2011 Western Australia named a 575-seat theatre in Perth after him, displaying the Oscar and the Joker costume in the foyer on opening night. His estate, once willed elsewhere, went to Matilda by family agreement — her security, his father said, was "an absolute priority."

Achievements

• Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor — 2009
• BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role — 2009
• Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture — 2009
• Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role
• Worked as television actor, film director and film actor