Heath Ledger
Another star who left before the world was ready, actor Heath Ledger was born April 4, 1979, in Perth, Australia. His father, Kim Ledger, was both a race car driver and a mining engineer with the family company, the Ledger Engineering Foundry. Heath’s mother, Sally Ledger, was a French teacher. Heath was an incredibly bright child, winning Western Australia’s Junior Chess Championship when he was only 10. Inspired by his older sister, Kate, an actress and later his publicist, to whom he was very close throughout his life, he was cast, also around the age of ten, in the lead role in his elementary school’s production of
Peter Pan. Sadly, his parents’ marriage fell apart at this same time, forcing Heath to spend the next few years moving back and forth between them. But his love of acting, which expanded into a love of dance and choreography as well, became his outlet, and his determination led to extra roles in a feature film called Clowning Around and the television series Ship to Shore.
He graduated from high school at the age of sixteen and promptly headed to Sydney, where he became even more serious about his career as an actor. He found television work almost immediately and made his first official appearance on the big screen in
1997’s Blackrock, which was impressive enough to land him a starring role in the successful Australian series Home and Away and in a fantasy series called Roar. Roar was financed with American money, giving Hollywood its first exposure to Heath Ledger. His costar and girlfriend, Liza Zane, convinced the nineteen-year-old actor to move with her to Los Angeles and find himself an agent.
Success came quickly after his arrival in the United States—in 1999 Heath costarred with Julia Stiles in the internationally successful movie 10 Things I Hate About You, after which he was officially in demand. In 2000 he was cast by Mel Gibson in
The Patriot. Next came Billy Bob Thornton’s Monster’s Ball, also in 2000, followed by A Knight’s Tale in 2001. All the while, after a breakup with Liza Zane, the handsome young Australian rising star was having no trouble finding success in his personal life as well, and his reputation as a playboy was attracting the attention of the Hollywood social scene and the tabloids.
A string of smart, gifted performances in several independent films kept him busy and stimulated through the early 2000s. But then, in 2005, along came the glaring spotlight that accompanied the controversial “gay cowboy movie,” Brokeback Mountain,
in which he costarred with another rising star, Jake Gyllenhaal. The film was a triumph for Heath Ledger—he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar, and he won the 2005 Best Actor awards from the San Francisco and New York Film Critics Circles.
He also met actress Michelle Williams on the set of Brokeback Mountain. Their whirlwind romance produced a daughter, Matilda Rose, who was born in New York on October 28, 2005. By now Heath was relentlessly targeted by the paparazzi, and it was as a result of that exhaustive attention that he, Michelle Williams, and their baby daughter moved from their home in New South Wales to an apartment in Brooklyn, where they lived until 2007.
He followed Brokeback Mountain with an Australian film called Candy, in which he played a heroin addict whose effort to overcome his addiction is mentored by the brilliant Geoffrey Rush. He was rewarded with three nominations for Candy and won the Film Critics Circle of Australia Best Actor Award. Next came the award-winning I’m Not There, a study of Bob Dylan with six actors portraying different aspects of his life, for which Ledger, the cast, director Todd Haynes, and the film’s casting director won the 2007 Independent Spirit Robert Altman Award.
In the early fall of 2007 the relationship between Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams ended, at around the time he gave what was to be his last completed film performance, as the character of the Joker in a Batman sequel called The Dark Knight. During filming, as Heath described in a November 4, 2007, New York Times interview, he struggled with severe insomnia. “Last week,” he said, “I probably slept an average of two hours a night. . . . I couldn’t stop thinking. . .” He’d begun taking Ambien to help him sleep, and even two at a time did nothing more than leave him “in a stupor, only to wake up an hour later,” with his mind still racing. Adding to his insomnia was a serious respiratory illness that struck in January 2008 while he was in London to shoot a Terry Gilliam film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, a performance he would never complete.
On January 22, 2008, Heath was found unconscious in his bed at approximately 2:45 p.m.All efforts to resuscitate him failed, and he was pronounced dead in his apartment in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood at 3:36 p.m. According to the autopsy performed the following day, he died of acute accidental intoxication from a combination of six prescription medications typically prescribed for insomnia, pain, depression, and respiratory congestion.
Tributes poured in from the film community and fans around the world, and after a private memorial ceremony in Los Angeles, Heath’s body was taken home to Perth by his parents and sister for a second memorial attended by hundreds of mourners. Michelle Williams told the press that she was sure his spirit would live on through their daughter, Matilda, to whom Heath’s family awarded her father’s $16.3 million estate. In the aftermath of Heath Ledger’s death at the age of twenty-eight, The Dark Knight broke several box office records, and for his role as the Joker he won both a Golden Globe and an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor.
From Francine
Heath was exhausted when he emerged from the tunnel and shocked to find himself here—he had every intention of waking up in his bed in his apartment a few hours after he settled in for a desperately needed nap. His spirit was safely Home before his unconscious body was found, and his first words when he realized where he was and what had happened were, “I want Matilda taken care of.” After reunions he was too dazed to enjoy, he was taken to Orientation even before his trip to the Scanning Machine. He slept, “detoxed,” received loving, reassuring therapy from his team of Orientators, and traveled frequently to the quadrant devoted to Orientation to meditate, take long, private canoe trips, read the works of Shakespeare (which he loves, I’m told), and listen to Mozart concertos (which I’m also told he loves).
His healing took nearly two years in your time, and he’s thriving now, euphorically resuming his life on the Other Side.
Heath appreciates the value of Orientation more than many, since he himself is a skilled Orientator. Since his latest incarnation he’s begun specializing as a physical therapist for those who arrive with unintended prescription drug overdoses and addictions.
He also returned with a passion for filmmaking, both in front of and behind the camera. “Loved the work, hated the fame,” he often says. He exhaustively studies current films in production around the world, and, in anticipation of his next incarnation, which will begin in 2016, he’s being trained as a film editor by the enormously gifted Verna Fields and honing his acting skills under the private tutelage of Spencer Tracy, whom he’s always admired.
Heath says he never planned for this most recent incarnation to be a long one, after four previous lifetimes in which he suffered a great deal both physically and mentally in his later years. Although his prescription drug use wasn’t recreationally motivated, he was painfully aware that it had developed into a serious problem that he would have to overcome if he were ever to be the involved, attentive father his daughter deserved. He wants Michelle and his family to know how deeply grateful he is to them for seeing to it that the entirety of his estate is being held in trust for her.
He also wants Michelle to promise their daughter that he will find his way to her when he comes back. She’ll be eleven years old when he’s born, and he’ll reenter her life as an “oddly familiar stranger” when she’s in her early thirties. He’s looking forward to it already.
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