Heath Ledger, Actor: 1979 – 2008
By Craig Kennedy - January 22nd, 2008; 2:03 pm
Sad news. Several sources including the New York Times are reporting that actor Heath Ledger (Brokeback Mountain, I’m Not There) was found dead this afternoon in a SoHo apartment.
According to The Times, Ledger was found by the housekeeper unconscious on a bed.
Few details have yet been made available though the inevitable speculation has already begun.
The 28-year-old Australian leaves behind a daughter, 2-year-old Matilda Rose.
He was set to appear as the Joker in the new Batman movie The Dark Knight coming this summer and he was in the middle of shooting a new film for Terry Gilliam.
Filed under: News, Obituaries
This is horrible news.
He will most likely be remembered like James Dean, a young actor with such a tremendous future ahead of him before died.
RIP.
Shocking and sad.
That’s awful.
I’m generally not too affected by this kind of news, but this hit me pretty hard, for some reason. Probably because he seemed on his way up, just getting to the point where he was going to go from being a potentially great actor with some great roles to being one of the greats.
That, and he was my imaginary boyfriend for months when I was sixteen.
Truly tragic.
I know what you mean. There’s something about his age and his career trajectory…he seemed on the verge of maybe something great…and his daughter. Plus it’s sudden and unexpected.
T_T
So tragic. And unexpected.
Hedwig and Craig, you said it perfectly. The trajectory of his career really did seem like it was verging on something great. I felt like I had been punched in the stomach when I got on the Internet and saw the headline.
Yes and it makes the frivolity of this morning all seem so pointless.
I’m sure the gossip pages are having a field day. It makes me sick just thinking about it.
I just wanted to echo everyone’s sentiments, particularly Hedwig’s. This sort of thing normally goes through one ear and out the other, but Ledger hits. His work in Brokeback Mountain was particularly memorable, most men of that age are chasing Lindsay Lohan around, Ledger was instead delivering a tortured performance on a par with some of Brando’s work (I was saying that before Ledger died, I might add, this isn’t obit hyperbole.) He also had one of my favorite moments in I’m Not There, the scene where he goes on a self absorbed even for him tangent with a group of friends and upsets his girlfriend.
This is unfortunate. That young man was very, very talented.
Right, Hedwig and Chuck. I think he had such a diverse following of fans because he acted in such diverse roles. 10 Things to Brokeback to I’m Not There to Dark Knight. Few actors have that range – everybody liked him for some role, and everybody will miss him for the roles that will never be. Seemed like a down-to-earth guy, too. Tough day…
Desperately sad news.
Incredibly sad news. Although fame tends to fuck people up, Ledger seemed pretty level headed and above the self-destructiveness of the Hollywood crowd.
Honestly, though, I was never that impressed with him as an actor. Brokeback Mountain didn’t do anything for me and most of his other movies were pretty bad (The Patriot, The Order, and A Knight’s Tale specifically). I was looking forward to his take on the Joker, though, and he was supposed to be working on films by Terry Gilliam and Terrence Malick
Hedwig, you have excellent taste. Heath was all kinds of beautiful.
I had to crash. I saw Atonement again last night & never really slept all morning. My dad just told me that the guy who played the Joker had been found dead (my father is a practical, no nonsense type that knows nothing about actors) & I couldn’t connect. I was too tired. I went back to sleep for a few minutes but then I remembered that he had said he was 28. I had a horrible feeling & ran to my computer. Sure enough…*sigh*
I was SO looking foward to The Dark Knight. It will now be a bittersweet pleasure. AT BEST. I echo many of the sentiments from this thread.
First of all, Craig’s thoughts concerning the frivolity of this morning. Which have now taken on a much different, far more somber perspective.
Also, Chuck’s absoutely right about the Brando comparison in Brokeback Mountain. Heath gave a performance for the ages. Such stunning, poignant work. You feel his pain & anger so acutely in that film,. It’s just such magnificent work on a grand scale. When you express an interest in acting or decide to become a performer, it often has to do with modes of expression. You want to move people – make them laugh or cry – the way other people have affected you.
This young man had a gift – & he had so much more to give to the world. It’s so sad that had to leave us so young. Poor little Matilda. This has knocked me for a loop.
RIP, Heath. You were very, very loved…but your legacy will live on like a bright shining light. Forever.
I’m just thankful that Ledger gave us what he did while he was here.
Like Rick and Ilsa will always have Paris, we will always have Ennis Del Mar.
Amen to that, Pierre.
I heard the news while on the bus to school today, the felling I got was so painful I could of sworn the bus had crashed. I still cannot believe it, I can hardly breathe.
I don’t even care about what he could have been, but what he was and the work he has done is already great, I will never forget it. This is actually too much to handle, how could such a thing happen?
I normally try to stay away from the so and so personally sucks line of commenting, but I think Jeff Wells and several other bloggers handling of the Heath Ledger thing is in terrible taste. It’s the sort of stuff you’d see in a satire: tasteless b.o. analysis of DK and that unpronouncable Gilliam thing mixed with cutesy hipster double speak. I don’t offend easily but this is offensive.
And what, precisely, is the point of including that Ledger suicide shot in the recent HE post besides to piss people off and get 100 comments? I’m not biting, I’ll comment here instead.
Yeah, I saw a few things posted yesterday already on various sites that were just in very poor taste. I think one of them was actually on O’Neil’s blog.
It’s very offensive. The best I can do is click the back button and ignore them.
I too found much of the guessing games regarding The Dark Knight at this early stage to be a bit out of bounds yesterday. The same goes for Gilliam’s unpronouncable film title. The news was about two minutes old and there were big discussions erupting over how Gilliam is cursed (which *seems* to be true) and now Warner Bros. will have to play things carefully in how they market The Dark Knight (maybe, maybe not).
Even if The Dark Knight was coming out tomorrow rather than six months from now, I’d find it kind of wrong to immediately speculate over the film’s fate and how it may or may not be impacted as many were yesterday.
However, he was a public figure and the reason we all know him is because he was an actor so ultimately such discussions are going to spring up. In the Internet blogathon age they happen instantaneously, though.
“However, he was a public figure and the reason we all know him is because he was an actor so ultimately such discussions are going to spring up. In the Internet blogathon age they happen instantaneously, though.”
Very true. I think the thing that really annoyed me was the tone of some of these things, that hipper than thou “Everyone knows that so and so will have to blah, blah, blah” crap. Wells, for me, has been tough to take for a while anyway.
Yeah, the immediate effort to pick his corpse apart so to speak, even before they had pulled the body from the apartment, was disturbing and offensive to say the least.
It really bothers me how quickly people are willing to seize on any piece of information and assume it’s true because it’s circulating on the internet. Amazing.
As for the BO angle, people like Wells make their money off page hits. There’s too much financial incentive for them to engage in such behavior, hence I don’t bother visiting his site.
I think it is disgusting, but hopefully Heath is remembered for his work and legacy he left behind and not all this media buzz surrounding his death. I cannot believe some people, to take something so shocking and heart breaking and turn it into a publicity gainer; I wish I could put them all down.
Agreed, Nicholas. All of the talk about what would happen with DK and the Gilliam film really bugged me. For the most part, at least, people were more concerned with his child and the fact that we lost a great talent. And they concentrated on the legacy of excellent work that he left us with.
By the way, it was Tom O’Neil who wrote an article on his blog about an interview he had with him, in which he now reveals certain things about Heath’s behavior then. Maybe I read too much into it, but it was already up yesterday and rubbed me the wrong way a little bit.
I quickly tuned out of the reportage. It made me sick and angry.
Even in the ’serious’ NY Times, you could feel them chomping at the bit with salacious sounding details, many of which are being revealed as exaggerations or untruths.
There’s a tendency to try and make a ’story’ out of basic news that supersedes the reporting of actual facts. I expect this sort of bullshit from bottomfeeders like TMZ, but the NY Times??
I tried to keep my little blurb as unadorned as possible, but I even found myself editing stuff out as the day went along.
I haven’t been back to HE today. Wells is an ass.
I have the urge to just keep going because I don’t want to dwell on this like one of those weird tragedy monkeys that latches on to every bit of drama, but I already feel weird about the light tone of my post last night.
Talking to several people, they’re still really shaken up by this. It’s hitting people harder than they or I expected. But what can you say or do?
It’s always awkward with someone you don’t know, but you feel like you do. In this case, I felt like I was still just getting to know him as an actor, let alone as a real person.
The first rule of LiC is “No gossip”, but you can’t talk about movies and let news like this completely slide. But where do you start and where does it end?
It was different with Bergman and Antonioni and the others. These were legends and their deaths felt more like facts of life than a tragedy.
I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud.
I’m sure many of you have done this already, but I just watched a clip of the ending of Brokeback Mountain.
For now I’m happy to let the man’s work speak for itself.
I always find the media frenzy behind celebrity deaths to be awkward and off-putting. It’s even more disconcerting to know this is the arena I might be stepping into as a journalism major. Even the “serious” outlets (like NY Times and NPR) go off the deep end on this sort of thing.
On one end of the spectrum, you have the gossip-mongers who turn every death into a sideshow, a “real life” soap opera for the masses. On the other, you have those who build the deceased up into idols. I don’t know if Ledger will be remembered in the same way James Dean is, but saying it won’t make it so.
It’s tragic enough that a 28-year-old man, who was someone’s father, son, lover, and friend, is dead. Why tear him down with gossip or speculate on his legacy before his body is even cold?
Agreed WJ. There is an element of human nature in either the building up or the tearing down…similar to the urge to slow down for a car wreck…but I expect more from traditional news outlets. All too often they pander to basic human instinct in the name of sensationalism and ratings when they’re the ones who should be holding the bar higher.
Something like this happens and the pressure for any media outlet to deliver something, anything, to stay competitive has to be enormous. These are the times we live in.
I just wish the competition was for the truth and not drama.
Am I just fantasizing about a day when media felt a responsibility to inform the public rather than a need to appease shareholders?
Maybe. Try looking for Sam Fuller’s movie Park Row (not on DVD) to see what the newspaper world was like in the 1890s – basically the same, that was when the term ‘Yellow Journalism’ was invented after all.
Well, the fourth estate has always been suspect. They have an unholy alliance with the entertainment industry. They both need each other to survive. Since the outset & beyond (talking films & radio in the 1930s, TV in the 50s, the Internet in the 90s) it’s been highly incendiary territory.
Within the last decade, though, it’s gotten considerably worse. Paparazzi aggressively chase down celebrities & hassle them everywhere they go. They insult famous people in public so that they can get over the top reactions & then take pictures.
Has anybody seen that TMZ thing on TV? They literally sit in a wide open space with a blackboard that looks like a classroom every morning. On the blackboard are the names of celebrities & whatever crisis or problem they’re going through. Then each person is assigned a different scenario. It is the most grimy, disgusting, horrific thing I’ve ever witnessed. They might as well be going through someone’s lingerie drawer in public.
It sickened me to the point that I never watched the entire episode…& I’m not going back for more.
I’m sure many people don’t realize the magnitude of this stuff when they decide to pusue artistic careers & they’re thrust into the spotlight. Actors/models/singers/sports figures used to complain about the tabloids, being recognized so they have no private life, asked for autographs etc. When they were upset about the inconvenience, people told them, “Well, you wanted to be well known & wealthy. This is what you signed up for. Take the good with the bad.”
But it’s gotten much, much uglier as of late. Stalking by obsessive fans (which intensified from the 80s on) is now a very common occurrence. Before then it was largely unheard of. This, combined with extreme aggression from the press, is making a lot of celebrities’ lives hell.
It’s thoroughly disgusting. All of it. Heath left this world on Tuesday. His family can’t even grieve & take the time to mourn him without all of these idiotic innuendoes & bare faced lies being thrown around. They’re just hoping to get something to stick to the wall.
He was a gorgeous, immensely talented young man. By all accounts a truly rare human being. But they have to make a circus out of everything. Gets people talking. Doesn’t matter if it upsets his precious family, his good friends & his devoted fans. It will mean more papers are sold, more news programs are watched, more hits on internet sites etc.
It’s all about money, children. That’s what it ALL boils down to.
What a world we live in. Ain’t life grand?
The thing about TMZ, they’re no better than the dreck they serve up. I don’t like it, but it’s a fact of life. What really bugs me is legitimate news outlets dishing this crap up.
But yeah, I’ve seen a few minutes of their show. Perfectly awful.