Heath Ledger was born on April 4, 1979 in Australia, and his love for acting was born when at age ten he had the chance to play Peter Pan in a school play. Shortly after his parents divorced, and encouraged by the words of encouragement from his sister Karen, found in his love for the theater the only possible refuge. When he finished high school, Heath began working on some television projects in Australia. Although his official debut was in 1993 within the series Ship to Shore, his career would not finish taking off until hiring for the first time a representative, who in a short time got him work in Sweat. There he had to play Snowy, a gay character in that adolescent fiction. Bob Zordan, who was the director of the Australian school he attended for nine years, remembers that the actor was anxious thinking whether he should accept that role or not, but the opportunity was too good to reject and he never regretted having accepted it.
Ledger's fear had to do with the fact that Australian television was very conservative and gays used to be represented in an almost caricatural way, a vision with which the actor disagreed. But in Sweat his character was treated with respect, so he accepted the challenge. Thanks to Snowy, he showed his first credentials in the world of acting and soon new works would appear. In 1997, he made his film debut with a small role in Blackrock, a film based on a well-known femicide that took place in that country and perpetrated by a group of teenagers. Although the film did not have worldwide reach, in Australia it was a true success. And so the fame of Heath Ledger began to grow, but he did not suspect that in a short time would get the lead in a movie in Hollywood.
Hollywood, teen movies and a perfect film
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In 1998, 10 things that I hate about you started filming, a teenage comedy that presented an original rereading of The Taming of the Shrew. Like many teen movies, 10 things I hate about you would not only be a hotbed of future stars, but I also breathed a freedom that other big-budget projects could not afford. But before starting to shoot, production had to find face to Patrick Verona, the bad guy in the story that not only would fall in love with the character played by Julia Stiles but also the public. Heath Ledger, at that time, was a stranger in the United States, but fate led him to be part of the hundred young people who showed up for the role. Marcia Ross, the head of casting at Disney, recalled the moment she first saw Ledger: Of course, the first thing I remember about him is her beauty, which was of a kind I had not seen before. He was a young boy, but he had something of an adult. It emanated maturity. There was a halo of confidence and I already knew it was him, that no one else was going to be able to play the character.
Almost twenty years after its premiere, 10 things that I hate about you is one of the most outstanding films about teenagers, a film of great wealth that like The Breakfast Club, Super Bad or Heavy Girls, can portray the world of teenagers with honesty and passion, studying their anguish, but without forcing the dramatic tone. And Ledger built a lovable student who, beyond his visceral rebellion, could not help but bow to Kat's charms. The other side of that little Hollywood success, he suffered it when he began to feel the troubles of becoming the fashionable heartthrob. That the actor did not like anything and also got tired of rejecting calls from producers who offered similar roles ... until he came up with a different proposal.
After many script rewrites (more than a dozen) the El Patriota project began to take shape. Mel Gibson's new film was centered on the figure of Benjamin Martin, a soldier who is forced to go to war despite his anti-war ideology. In the film, the protagonist has a very close relationship with Gabriel, his eldest son, a character that ended up in the hands of Ledger (who won the arm to heavyweights like Ryan Phillippe, Elijah Wood and Jake Gyllenhaal). Gibson and Ledger were united and the young actor had the possibility of composing a tragic hero in a film that was one of the great successes of 2000.
Clasic bean, pop idol
While negotiating the possibility of joining Change of Life, a drama that earned him the Oscar to Halle Berry, but was just one of those stuffed movies moralina that so much like Hollywood, Ledger agreed to take on a character that was , literally, a beau in armor.
gentleman's heart premiered in 2001 and although many specialists received it with some warmth, there were a handful of critics who understood that they were facing a very particular cinematic phenomenon. Brian Helgeland's film was a combination of a sports film, a love story and the saga of a young man with few resources, who dreamed of being a gentleman, a formula that the director bathed in pop tincture with songs by David Bowie and Robbie Williams. It was an atypical film, which won over time and became a classic.
Ledger's William Thatcher was a dashing hero in the line of Errol Flynn's swordsmen, who, like the great Hollywood classics, also had a charismatic cast that included great actors like Alan Tudyk or Paul Bettany. Without hesitation, Corazon de Caballero was another hit in his short filmography.
The director Helgeland found in Heath his fetish actor. The chemistry that developed between the two in the filming of Corazon de caballero was unbeatable and it did not cost the director to see him in his next projects. In an interview in 2009, he told the reasons that led him to opt for the Australian in the main role: When I chose Heath, I thought he was basically a stranger. I was filming El patriota at that time. And part of my goal was to have a cast that the public did not know. I think it was easier for the viewer to enter the world of the film and accept what I wanted to do if there was a stranger at the front, instead of a Matt Damon, a Ben Affleck or one of those actors.
Years later and after the death of Ledger, Helgeland recalled, very moved, the filming of that film: Once Heath told me that Knight's Heart was for him as a photo album and that he had had a lot of fun doing that movie. And that means for me, because the film is the photo album of a great guy in which it was a great time.
In 2003, both returned to work together in Devourer of sins, a less accomplished story than Knight's Heart, but with some interesting ideas. The film, in the worst case, served to see the power of the actor and how he could carry on a story even when it had several fissures. In the inkwell, Helgeland had a most interesting project: an adaptation of Moby Dick with the Australian in the skin of Ishmael.
In later years, Ledger starred in several films that beyond his relative success, allowed him to explore other areas. He was in The Four Feathers and, in 2003, he made with Orlando Bloom (another star of the moment) a film based on Ned Kelly, one of the most popular historical figures in Australia. In those years, he also worked for the first time with Terry Gilliam in The Brothers Grimm, a film that despite its desprolijidades has many hits. For Heath, working with the former Monty Python was a turning point in his career, because he allowed him to explore the extremes and play with totally atypical performances. The acriz Naomi Watts, who for those years had been paired with the actor, remembered what it meant to put himself in the hands of that director: I think Terry Gilliam really unleashed the talent that was always hidden in Heath, but maybe he was afraid to take advantage Terry simply brought out the best of Heath's inner world, and he could see that he was a very introspective person and that he kept a lot of things inside him.
In 2005, Heath Ledger premiered Secret in the Mountain, a work that would go down in film history and for which many viewers who had never been interested in his previous films, would prove that the Australian was one of the most promising interpreters of Hollywood While the William of the Knight's Heart or the Patrick of 10 things that I hate about you were not minor challenges, it is true that the character of Ennis del Mar starred in a love story so intense and so universal that it quickly became an unbeatable cultural phenomenon. At the time of its release, some critics considered that the film was less concerned with telling a story than sending a message (basically declaring that Hollywood could tell a love story between two men without prejudice), but the film was also a gigantic blockbuster. Secret in the mountain gave Heath that challenge he was looking for so eagerly: to play a tough character, with few words but many feelings, with which he could escape to the box of teen idol and conquer an adult audience that has not yet I had discovered it. In this way, the Australian made a sublime interpretation that definitely marked his career.
Secret in the mountain also meant meeting two very important people for their personal life. Jake Gyllenhaal, his co-star, would become one of his closest friends. Although they had known each other for a long time (they had begun to forge a friendship when both were discarded for the main role of Moulin Rouge), the shared work in this film brought them together. On the other hand, on the set he started a relationship with Michelle Williams, also one of the co-stars. During the filming both fell in love and after several brief relationships that did not finish to prosper, Heath maintained with Williams a courtship that lasted until 2007. In the framework of that relationship would be born Matilda, on October 28, 2005, and Ledger would choose Gylleenhaal as godfather of the girl.
Together with Michelle Williams, the woman with whom she had her only daughter, Matilda
The birth of the child was a moment that symbolized the contradiction that Ledger suffered daily: to be a public person who seeks to protect his privacy to the maximum, at the most successful moment of his career. This tension stressed him. At that time the actor lived in Brooklyn because he did not want his daughter to grow up in Hollywood and on those initial months of the baby, Williams recalled in an interview: The first six weeks of Matilda were an incredibly insular and protective time. We were just her, me and him, living in our new house in Brooklyn. No nanny, no help, not even our families. Some friends came from time to time, but we were really committed to establishing a link between the three. But then that bubble broke because of the work. Secret in the mountains was about to be released and the press began to show signs of life. Likewise, those six weeks were of great happiness.
After Secreto en la montaña, the actor starred in a little-known film called Casanova, but also I'm Not There, the unclassifiable experiment by Todd Haynes inspired by different passages, myths and legends about Bob Dylan. For Haynes, knowing the person behind the actor was a very mobilizing experience: He began to have concerns linked to the direction. We really shared the work, and really was interested in the way we were doing my movie. Around there he came and whispered some ideas that were bright, very bright. We were very close during this project. He was an extraordinary person. He was so incredibly talented and humble at the same time. I just loved it and I will always miss it.
I'm legend
Heath Ledger's Joker has mystique and that can not be denied. Batman: The Knight of the Night was a film that transcended the screen to become a true phenomenon that was crowned as the highest grossing movie of 2008 worldwide. And that piece is not only the magnum opus of Christopher Nolan, but also the great Batman film and the one that presents a Joker with a unique stamp. The gentleman of the night is a perfect policeman who pays the best Michael Mann, but adding a protagonist who is dedicated to jumping from ceiling to ceiling. But above all, it is a devastating film that understands corruption and defeat as inherent parts of life. Either you die a hero or you live long enough to become a villain, said Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) in a line that summed up perfectly the pessimistic heart of the movie. And in that world, the Australian gave his best interpretation, that of an anarchic villain who happily embraced the madness that dominated him. And that internal world to which Naomi Watts referred, that private universe of the actor that no director seemed to approach, exploded as never thanks to the possibilities offered by a character like the Joker. .
On January 22, 2008, the actor was found dead at his home in Manhattan. Two weeks later, and after endless unhappy speculations, the autopsy revealed that he had accidentally died by mixing antidepressants with sleeping pills. There was no farewell note in the room, his death had been an accident. Simply the actor ignored those who advised him not to make those combinations of pills. Her sister Kate talked to him the night before her death and had asked her to be careful, to be prudent in the use of prescription drugs.
Surely one of the most unpleasant aspects of the days after the death of Heath, was the obsession to relate his death to his work composing the Joker. In many media they claimed that to get fully into the role, Ledger had gone into a deep depression, that the villain's madness had led him to have sleep problems and that for that reason he had become addicted to sleeping pills. Regrettably, not even after the death did the media cease to harass an actor who suffered the siege of the press during his lifetime. In this context, the most unpleasant blow came from Jack Nicholson (who played the same villain in Tim Burton's Batman), who in an interview said very carefree that he had warned Heath about the role, a comment that fueled the crazy possibility that that interpretation had killed Ledger. In April of last year, and within the framework of the premiere of a documentary that presented unpublished images of the archive and the daily life of the actor, his sister spoke about that theory and with great sincerity commented that with that role Heath was having fun. All the articles that they published said that he was depressed and that interpreting that character was consuming him. But, honestly, what happened was the opposite of that. They could not be more wrong. He had a wonderful sense of humor, and I suppose only his friends and family knew that, but he was having a lot of fun. I was not depressed for being the Joker!
It is better to think of Heath from his indelible mark on the cinema, than lamenting about how his death still marks a great void. And while both views are true, it is preferable to resignify Ledger from his finished work, than from what could be. The interpreter received a posthumous Oscar for his work as the Joker and the film he was filming at the time of his death (The imaginary world of Dr. Parnassus, again with Terry Gilliam) was concluded by other actors. Matilda is twelve years old today, and Michelle is jealously watching the media not to expose her. Meanwhile, the actor's relatives and their friends continue to remember what it meant to share a fragment of their lives with Ledger.
Without mentioning it, and trying to be very careful with her words, Michelle Williams gave an interview two years ago for Porter magazine in which she somehow seemed to recognize that she is already at peace with the memory of her daughter's father: I see Matilda in the sun, in mesh, riding a bicycle, smiling and greeting me because she is going to see her friends. And I go back to my house and I get excited for that incredible and simple moment of everyday happiness. And in that moment I feel that we achieved it. It is not that we are well, but that she is happy. And life led us to a place where it is not only about living, but about prospering.