Heath Ledger

Heath Ledger was found dead on Tuesday, January 22, in his apartment in Manhattan’s SoHo. Rumors about the causes of his death, it is inevitable, have skyrocketed. More because he must have been affected by his separation from Michelle Williams, with whom he had a two-year-old daughter, Matilda Rose. Interestingly, he had commented about her daughter: “You learn more about yourself through your daughter, I suppose. I think you also look at death differently. It’s a paradox: you feel good thinking about death because you think you survive in it, but at the same time, you don’t want to die because you want to be close to her for the rest of her life.” Pending the autopsy, and despite the haste and morbidity with which some move, the truth is that there is no clear indication of violence or suicide. His family does not doubt that the death was accidental. The actor had a bottle of prescription sleeping pills on his nightstand, and no illegal substances were found in his apartment. The actor had declared that lately he had trouble sleeping,I’m Not There and The Dark Knight . A large crowd gathered around his house as the news spread, and one of the filmmakers who worked with him on The Patriot , fellow Australian Mel Gibson , declared: “I had such hopes for him. He was just getting off the ground, and to lose your life so young is a tragic loss.”

The actor was born in Perth, Australia, on April 4, 1979. His first steps as a child performer were Peterpanesque – he embodied the eternal child imagined by James M. Barrie – in a local theater company. Ledger told me: “Becoming an actor happened thanks to my older sister, who liked the theater. I would go to see her and sit in the front row at her performances. I loved her, because somehow I felt what she felt.” He later became a child television actor, and in 1992 he tried his hand at film with Clowning Around , which wasn’t a big deal. While Two Hands , shot in Australia, was a title in a Tarantino style, which allowed him to make the jump to Hollywood. Actually the first work with which he attracted attention was10 Reasons to Hate You , version in the adolescent key of Shakespeare’s comedy “The Taming of the Shrew”.

Putting the pike in the mecca of cinema, Ledger was lucky enough to become the fictional son of Mel Gibson himself, in an epic film set in the war of independence: The Patriot . The actor seemed comfortable in period films, because from there he went on to star in a medieval film full of conscious anachronisms and very romantic, A Knight’s Tale . The birth of a star was confirmed. And also his connection with a certain adventure cinema, since he would intervene in the new version of a classic story of love and courage in the era of English colonialism: The Four Feathers (2002) ; and in Ned Kelly , a kind of Australian western, shot in a native country that he never forgot.

It draws attention to the actor who never overacts, he would be called the incarnation of the “quiet man”, although in his films he sometimes faced extreme situations. He exudes great energy, but it seems that the procession goes inside, that his interior is a whole world to discover. Not everything is valuable in Ledger’s filmography: the role of his priest in Sin Eater did not give much of itself, so stupid was the story that the film narrated; but it is necessary to underline that the actor took a risk, either by accepting a non-main role in Monster’s Ball (there the role was played by the Oscar-winning Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton ), or by doing the same in the surfer and skateboarder The Lords of Dogtown .

It’s obvious he took a risk, and a big one, with Brokeback Mountain , the gay love story directed by Ang Lee that earned him an Oscar nomination. The film was important for several reasons: the complexity of her role; becoming an involuntary protagonist of the powerful pink lobby, which used the film as a battering ram for his claims; and meeting actress Michelle Williams, his partner for two years and the mother of his daughter. Almost immediately he did Terry Gilliam ‘s The Secret of the Brothers Grimm , where he was one of the fraternal storytellers, the other being Matt Damon . And Casanova , a failed revision of the myth of the seductive womanizer. Dark, depressing and, yes, risky, it was Candy, a hellish descent into the degrading horror of drug addiction, an uncompromising and hopeless film, where he once again returned to his beloved Australia.

Starring in I’m Not There ‘s outreach to Bob Dylan – co-star and Oscar nominee Cate Blanchett said she was “sad and impressed” and “always admired his continued development as an artist” – it would be a joke of fate that his last character is Batman’s Joker in the long-awaited The Dark Knight , to be released in the summer of 2008. And what was to be his second collaboration with Gilliam, The Imaginary of Doctor Parnassus , remains bogged down .