Heath Ledger

• 1. Introduction

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  Heath Ledger made twenty films in a career that ended while he was still a young man. His last great performance won him an Academy Award that he never had the chance to hold. How did a schoolboy from Australia become an actor whom many called one of the best of his generation? Why did he work so hard to avoid repeating himself? What happened around the time of his final screen roles, and how did the people who admired him finish the work he left behind?

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• 2. Perth Beginnings

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  On the 4th of April 1979, in Perth, Western Australia, Heath Andrew Ledger was born to Sally Ramshaw and Kim Ledger. His mother taught French. His father raced cars and worked as a mining engineer, and his family had founded and owned the Ledger Engineering Foundry. The Sir Frank Ledger Charitable Trust carries the name of his great-grandfather. Ledger's ancestry was English, Irish and Scottish.

  At ten years old, Ledger played Peter Pan in a school production at Guildford Grammar School. He had earlier attended Mary's Mount Primary School in Gooseberry Hill. His parents separated when he was ten, and they divorced when he was eleven.

  His older sister Kate, who became an actress and later a publicist, was his close companion and inspired his stage work. His love of the dancer Gene Kelly shaped his choreography. That choreography carried a 60-member Guildford Grammar team to what was described as its "first all-boy victory" at the Rock Eisteddfod Challenge. Two half-sisters came later. Ashleigh Bell was born in 1990 to his mother and her second husband Roger Bell. Olivia Ledger was born in 1996 to his father and his second wife Emma Brown.

  At sixteen, Ledger sat his graduation exams early to earn his diploma, then left school to act. With Trevor DiCarlo, his best friend since the age of three, he drove across Australia from Perth to Sydney. He came back to Perth for a small part in the television production Clowning Around in 1991. In the 1996 series Sweat he played a cyclist.

  The 1990s brought more television work, including Ship to Shore in 1993 and the short-lived American fantasy-drama Roar in 1997. That year he also appeared in Home and Away, one of Australia's most successful television shows. His feature film debut came with the Australian film Blackrock, also in 1997. A year later, in 1998, he moved to the United States.

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• 3. Hollywood Years

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  In 1999, Ledger took the lead in the romantic comedy 10 Things I Hate About You, and it became his breakthrough. The same year he appeared in Two Hands, an acclaimed Australian crime film directed by Gregor Jordan. Jordan would direct him again in Ned Kelly in 2003.

  In The Patriot in 2000, Ledger played Gabriel Martin, the eldest son of Benjamin Martin, who was played by Mel Gibson. In Monster's Ball in 2001, he played Sonny Grotowski, son of Hank Grotowski, played by Billy Bob Thornton. Leading or title roles followed in A Knight's Tale, The Four Feathers, The Order, Casanova, The Brothers Grimm and Lords of Dogtown. In 2001, the ShoWest convention named him "Male Star of Tomorrow".

  In Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, Ledger played Ennis Del Mar, a Wyoming ranch hand who falls in love with the aspiring rodeo rider Jack Twist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. The New York Film Critics Circle and the San Francisco Film Critics Circle each named him best actor of 2005. He was nominated for a Golden Globe, an Actor Award, a BAFTA and an Academy Award. At twenty-six, he was the eighth-youngest nominee in the best actor category.

  Critic Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote that Ledger "magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character." Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called the performance an acting miracle. Of one scene he wrote: "To see him inhale the scent of a shirt hanging in Jack's closet is to take measure of the pain of love lost."

  In 2006, Ledger co-starred with fellow Australian Abbie Cornish in Candy. They played young heroin addicts in love who try to break free, with Geoffrey Rush as their mentor. Ledger played Dan, a sometime poet, and earned three best actor nominations. Soon after the film's release, he was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  In 2007, Todd Haynes cast him in I'm Not There, in which six actors embody different aspects of Bob Dylan. Ledger played Robbie Clark, a moody counter-culture actor representing the romantic side of Dylan. He reportedly said that accolades were never his motivation.

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• 4. Behind The Camera

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  On the 23rd of February 2008, Todd Haynes accepted the Independent Spirit Robert Altman Award on behalf of the cast of I'm Not There, and Ledger shared it after his death. In his tribute, Haynes spoke highly of the music videos Ledger had made with his production company, The Masses. Ledger wanted to become a film director.

  In 2006, he directed videos for the Australian hip hop artist N'fa, for the title track of the album Cause An Effect and for the single "Seduction Is Evil (She's Hot)". Later that year he launched a record label, The Masses Music, with the singer Ben Harper. He also directed a video for Harper's song "Morning Yearning".

  At the 2007 Venice Film Festival, Ledger told a news conference that he hoped to make a documentary about the British singer-songwriter Nick Drake. Drake died in 1974 at the age of twenty-six from an overdose of an antidepressant. Ledger created a video for Drake's 1974 song "Black Eyed Dog" and acted in it. The title came from Winston Churchill's phrase for depression, the black dog.

  The video was shown publicly only twice in Ledger's lifetime. The first was the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle, held from the 1st to the 3rd of September 2007. The second was a tribute evening to Drake at the Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood on the 5th of October 2007, sponsored by the American Cinematheque. After his death, the video spread on the Internet.

  Ledger was also working with the Scottish screenwriter and producer Allan Scott on an adaptation of Walter Tevis's 1983 novel The Queen's Gambit. It would have been his first feature as a director, and he meant to act in it too. The Canadian actor Elliot Page was proposed for the lead.

  His last directing work was two music videos shot before his death. One was an animated video for the Modest Mouse song "King Rat", which premiered on the 4th of August 2009. The other was a video for Grace Woodroofe's cover of David Bowie's "Quicksand".

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• 5. Craft And Public Life

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  "I feel like I am wasting my time if I repeat myself," Ledger said, explaining why his roles, from romantic heroes to tragic figures, were so different from one another. He also admitted that he was never satisfied with his work. In his words, "The day I say, 'It's good' is the day I should start doing something else." He liked to wait between jobs so that he would start each project creatively hungry. Acting, he said, was about harnessing "the infinite power of belief."

  Christopher Nolan, who directed him in The Dark Knight, wrote: "I've never felt as old as I did watching Heath explore his talents." Marc Forster, who directed Monster's Ball, praised Ledger as disciplined, observant and intuitive, and said he took the work very seriously. Haynes compared his presence to James Dean and noted a rare maturity beyond his years.

  Ledger resisted being summed up. "I never figured out who 'Heath Ledger' is on film," he said, adding that he had many stories inside him and wanted to achieve more than "one flat note."

  Away from sets, Ledger was an avid chess player who had entered tournaments when he was young. As an adult he played with other enthusiasts in Washington Square Park in Manhattan. He followed the West Coast Eagles, the Australian rules football team based in Perth. He was also an obsessive photographer who loved taking stills and then drawing over them with paint, markers or nail polish.

  In 2004, Ledger began a relationship with the actress Michelle Williams, whom he met on the set of Brokeback Mountain. Their daughter, Matilda Rose Ledger, was born in New York City on the 28th of October 2005. Her godparents are Jake Gyllenhaal and Busy Philipps, Williams's co-star from Dawson's Creek. In January 2006, Ledger put his home in Bronte, Sydney, up for sale. He shared a house with Williams in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, from 2005 to 2007. In September 2007, Williams's father confirmed that the couple had separated. Gemma Ward later said she began dating Ledger in November 2007, and that their families spent that Christmas together in Perth.

  His relationship with the Australian press was sometimes turbulent, and it led him to drop plans for his family to live part-time in Sydney. In 2004, he strongly denied reports that he had spat at journalists on the Sydney set of Candy. On the 13th of January 2006, photographers squirted him and Williams with water pistols at the Sydney premiere of Brokeback Mountain.

  At the 2005 Screen Actors Guild Awards, Ledger giggled while presenting Brokeback Mountain as a nominee, and the Los Angeles Times called it an apparent gay spoof. He telephoned the newspaper to say it was stage fright, and he had been told only minutes earlier that he would be presenting. Later he criticised two Utah cinemas that refused to show the film. In the same interview he wrongly claimed that lynchings had occurred in West Virginia as recently as the 1980s. State scholars said none had been documented there since 1931.

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• 6. Sleepless Nights

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  On the 4th of November 2007, The New York Times published Sarah Lyall's interview with Ledger, conducted while he was working in London. He described the Joker as a "psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy." He also said the role was worsening his usual insomnia. "Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night," he told her. "My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going."

  He told Lyall that he had taken two Ambien pills after one did not work. They left him in a stupor, and he woke an hour later with his mind still racing. Williams later told Interview magazine that he had struggled with sleep for as long as she had known him. In her words, "He had too much energy."

  In January 2008, Ledger finished his last film assignment in London and prepared to return to New York City. He seemed to be suffering from a respiratory illness. His co-star Christopher Plummer said the cast had caught colds while shooting outside on damp nights. Plummer believed Ledger had walking pneumonia and had not treated it quickly enough with antibiotics. Plummer recalled Ledger saying he could not sleep and was taking pills to help.

  Ledger was widely reported to have struggled with substance abuse. After his death, Entertainment Tonight aired footage from 2006 in which he said he used to smoke five joints a day for twenty years. News outlets reported that drug use had led Williams to ask him to move out of their Brooklyn apartment. His publicist said the reports of drug use were inaccurate.

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• 7. The Final Day

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  At about 3 p.m. on Tuesday, the 22nd of January 2008, Ledger's housekeeper Teresa Solomon and his massage therapist Diana Wolozin found him face down and unresponsive in his bed. His loft was at 421 Broome Street in the SoHo neighbourhood of Manhattan. Wolozin had arrived early for a 3 p.m. appointment. According to police, she first telephoned his friend Mary-Kate Olsen, who was in Los Angeles and sent her New York security guard to the scene.

  At 3:26 p.m., Wolozin dialed 911 to say that Ledger was not breathing. At the urging of the operator, she gave him CPR, but it did not revive him. Paramedics arrived at 3:33 p.m. and could not revive him either. At 3:36 p.m., Ledger was pronounced dead. He was 28 years old.

  On the 6th of February 2008, the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner released its findings. They followed an autopsy on the 23rd of January and a full toxicology analysis. Ledger died of acute intoxication from the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine. The manner of death was ruled accidental, resulting from the abuse of prescribed medications. The office declined to disclose an official estimated time of death, though outlets reported a police estimate between 1 p.m. and 2:45 p.m.

  In 2017, the forensic pathologist Jason Payne-James asserted that Ledger might have survived without the hydrocodone and oxycodone. He said the drug mixture, with a possible chest infection, caused Ledger to stop breathing.

  Late in February 2008, a DEA investigation cleared two American physicians, in Los Angeles and Houston, of wrongdoing. They had prescribed Ledger other medications, not the pills that killed him. On the 4th of August 2008, Mary-Kate Olsen's attorney Michael Miller denied that she had supplied the drugs. Two days later, on the 6th of August 2008, the US Attorney's Office in Manhattan closed its investigation without charges, saying there was no viable target. How Ledger obtained the oxycodone and hydrocodone is still not known.

  Ledger's will was filed in New York City on the 28th of February 2008. It had been signed in 2003, before he met Williams and before his daughter was born, and it split his estate between his parents and his siblings. His father Kim Ledger called Matilda's well-being an absolute priority. On the 27th of September 2008, Kim Ledger said the family had agreed to leave the US$16.3 million estate to Matilda Rose.

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• 8. Posthumous Legacy

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  Through the night of the 22nd of January 2008, crowds of reporters, mourners and fans gathered outside Ledger's apartment building, and some left flowers. The next morning, his parents and sister read a short statement outside his mother's house in Applecross, a riverside suburb of Perth. Tributes came from the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, from Warner Bros., and from thousands of fans. Daniel Day-Lewis dedicated his Screen Actors Guild Award to Ledger and called his Brokeback Mountain performance "unique, perfect".

  The actor Verne Troyer had worked with Ledger on The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. He tattooed a heart on his hand, copying a symbol that Ledger had scrawled beside his email address. Williams said in her first public statement, on the 1st of February, that his spirit lived on in their daughter.

  On the 9th of February, several hundred invited guests attended a memorial service at Penrhos College in Perth. Ledger's body was then cremated at Fremantle Cemetery, and only ten close family members attended a private service. That night, family and friends held a wake on Cottesloe Beach.

  The band Eskimo Joe, who were in New York when Ledger died, wrote the song "Foreign Land" as a tribute. Justin Vernon of Bon Iver began the song "Perth" in 2008, after the director Matt Amato, a friend of Ledger, spent a three-day wake with the band. Amato had been shooting their video for "The Wolves (Act I & II)" on the day Ledger died. In January 2011, Perth's State Theatre Centre of Western Australia named a 575-seat theatre the Heath Ledger Theatre. For its opening, his Oscar and his Joker costume stood in the foyer.

  When Ledger died, he had finished about half his work on The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, as the character Tony. Director Terry Gilliam decided to finish the film by having Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell play fantasy transformations of Tony. The three actors donated their fees to Ledger's daughter. The film was released in 2009.

  Ledger had completed his work on The Dark Knight in October 2007. Nolan said that editing the film right after his death was tremendously emotional. He added no digital effects to alter Ledger's performance. Nolan dedicated the film partly to Ledger and partly to the technician Conway Wickliffe, who died in a car accident while the crew prepared a stunt.

  The Dark Knight reached cinemas in July 2008, nearly six months after Ledger's death, and broke several box office records. Critic David Denby of The New Yorker called Ledger mesmerising in every scene. Christian Bale, who played Batman opposite him, rejected the idea that the role had harmed him. He pointed to Ledger's own description of it as the most fun he had ever had playing a character. Gilliam called the claim that the Joker drove him mad "absolute nonsense".

  At the 66th Golden Globe Awards on the 11th of January 2009, Ledger won best supporting actor, and Nolan accepted for him. His Academy Award nomination was announced on the 22nd of January 2009, one year to the day after his death. On the 22nd of February 2009, his parents and sister accepted the Oscar for best supporting actor on his behalf. He became the second person to win a posthumous acting Oscar, after Peter Finch for Network. He was also the first comic-book movie actor to win an Oscar for acting, and the fourth-youngest winner of the category.

  The academy decided, after talks with the family, that Matilda Rose would own the statuette. Her mother, Michelle Williams, would hold it in trust until Matilda's eighteenth birthday in 2023. In 2017, the documentary I Am Heath Ledger was released on the 3rd of May, built from archive footage and interviews.

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