Heath Ledger (1979 – 2008)
A tribute to the reluctant star, whose finest roles eerily mimicked his all-too-short life http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/18355273/heath_ledger_1979_8211_2008/2He arrived onscreen looking windy and fresh, as if he'd just blown in from someplace else. His face just missed being pretty; there was the tiny, precise mouth, but also the mulish neck and shoulders and then the rich tobacco roll of the voice. He became a locus of passionate admiration, the senior you hoped to be as a freshman. Two days after Heath Ledger's death, at the age of twenty-eight, Daniel Day-Lewis halted an appearance in the confessional of Oprah. "I'm sorry - it just seems somehow strange to be talking about anything else," the actor said. "I didn't know him. I have an impression, a strong impression, that I would have liked him very much, as a man, if I had."
We count on our performers for many things — as demonstrators of excellence, as figures of monstrous envy — but we rarely expect to feel luckier than they are, and never anticipate they will leave without a speech. Friends tell me they can't stop thinking about Ledger; none can explain why, some apologize for the absurdity, in a nation at war, to find this outpouring of sympathy and shock directed towards one man. But stars embody our dream lives. They're who we intend to be, once we get the job stuff settled, find the person we'll love, once the shooting is over and we're finally at home. Stars embody one quality; that's what makes them stars. And Ledger was a star in a very particular way. To stare at him — and in theaters and living rooms, we stare with an intensity we exercise nowhere else — was to receive a sense of capacity, power, and potential, a kind of perfectly vivid health and youth. That's why his death feels wrong, and why the response has felt primitive, tribal. It means youth and vitality aren't enough. It's like losing a season.
The story moved swiftly, with unpredictable reversals of field. A massage therapist discovered his body on a Tuesday afternoon, face down in his Manhattan bedroom. By evening, the named culprit was recreational drugs, an overdose; pills were reported strewn by his bedside. By Wednesday, these turned out to be prescription medications, neatly stowed in bottles and foil wrap and a rolled-up bill had been inspected and cleared of charges. The substances were Xanax, Valium and Ambien, which made Ledger's bedroom just like a thousand others in downtown Manhattan, home of the anxious, the ambitious, the sleepless. There was the sight of Michelle Williams — his ex-fiancée, mother of his daughter, Matilda — in a car bound for the airport, resembling a first lady in mourning. (Arriving in Brooklyn, what stuck was not the pale blue lightning of the digital cameras, but the sight of chauffeurs and bodyguards fishing into the passenger cab for her daughter's stuffed animals and toys.) There was his family expressing their regrets, in front of a sunny suburban house and lawn that looked shockingly ordinary. At Sundance, premieres were canceled, in Hollywood, studio statements were released. By the weekend, New York Police were speculating that the medications had accidentally bonded into a kind of cocktail that stopped Ledger's heart. Gossip columnists darkly hinted of hard partying, of stories to come that would "make our collective hair stand on end," and a People magazine obituary issue was like a tone poem on the single word "excess." ("He was trying to lead a healthy life," a friend told the magazine. "But sometimes he went to excess.") Outside the Screen Actors Guild Awards, fringe evangelicals picketed, because Ledger had once portrayed a homosexual cowboy. The last most people saw of him was in a zippered black bag, wheeling into an ambulance, with its sad little bumps for his feet and head.
Ledger grew up in Perth, Western Australia — "the most isolated city," he told me, "in the world." His father designed and drove race cars, mother taught French, and Ledger offered something of their mix, the rugged and the cultural. He wanted to act, could not cast himself in the role of student — "I had a problem with authority" — and at sixteen he drove to Sydney with less than an Australian dollar in his pocket. It was already a life of bold strokes, simple and large movements and changes of scenery; a life from a movie.
When it happens, it happens fast. Ledger's Hollywood career began a year before George Bush's election, and did not outlast his presidency. In 1999, Ledger took the lead boyfriend role in the high school comedy 10 Things I Hate About You, where his appearance was gently disorienting, as if Sean Connery had been aged down and cast in a John Hughes picture. For a year, he refused other high school roles; one of his talents was for pausing at the right moment, sitting still, and waiting for situations to develop in his favor. He played Mel Gibson's son in The Patriot. Then he was cast to carry the medieval drama A Knight's Tale. He was twenty-one. His body still had a kid's loose, unstringed movements, but it was clear he would become a star. There was the big frontal block of the smile, lines racing up from his chin to his ears; when he smiled, his face fanned brutal and turned warn; it was a great, manly smile, a smile that commanded.
The second part of Ledger's career was a reaction to that picture: he'd glimpsed the highway being paved ahead of him, the career he was being given; he stood up in the middle of a studio marketing meeting, locked himself in a bathroom. "It was a full-on anxiety attack," he said. "I was hitting my head, hitting the walls." From there, he steered his own course, towards darker movies, chillier commercial prospects. He meant to scrape away the star's glossy coating, replace it with the raw, flexible skin of an actor. "I wanted to take the blond out of my career," he said, "kill the direction it was going. I was like, 'How am I going to make this a career I would like to have?' "
Four years later, from the uplands of award nominations and Brokeback Mountain, having acted with directors Lasse Hallstrü m, Terry Gilliam, Ang Lee, he looked back at the moment with satisfaction. He'd stepped in, and piloted own life. "I just felt like I earned it, like I deserved it more, you know? And I sleep better that way."
"Well, that's very important," I said.
"Yeah, it is," he said. "Absolutely. You die young ?"
Off-set, he clomped around in big boots and a hoodie, hands kangarooed in the pocket; interviewed, he kept on his sunglasses, to subtly maintain a private world, a kind of eye Kevlar. Celebrity was impractical, was what the clothes said. He hadn't accommodated himself to the deal, with its pluses and minuses: you sell the media slices of private life, in exchange for set time and the immense freedoms of the salary. Profiles began to circle around the same words: wary, restless. (A London Times writer, who interviewed him on six occasions, wrote simply that Ledger had "worried himself to death.") He couldn't seem to disengage; the inexactness bothered him. "For you or anyone sitting here to really know me," he explained to me, "you'd have to sit here for a year, it would take that much time for me to explain it."
He approached his own work with the same hardness; he did not, he said, class himself an artist, and never believed he'd been good. "I always want to pull myself apart and dissect it." Accepting a part, "I always go through the process of hating it, hating myself, thinking I've fooled them, I can't actually do this." Leger had no formal training, and there's this to be said for acting school: it teaches you to approach a role as foreign, as a language you'll temporarily speak. Ledger didn't appear to have that. He needed to dig for (and inhabit) the part of himself that was the character. "Performance comes from absolutely believing what you're doing," he said. "You convince yourself, and believe in the story with all your heart." It didn't always shut off when a production did, and I think it ground him. Finishing Brokeback, he immediately flew to Venice, and Casanova. "I don't think I could have just gone home and not worked, to unwind from it," Ledger told me. "I would have just sat there and kind of slowly beat my head against the wall, until it went away."
On the Brokeback Mountain set, he'd began a relationship with Michelle Williams, his onscreen wife. They had a daughter — "we just fell very deeply into one another's arms, our bodies made those decisions for us"— bought a Brooklyn townhouse. A year later, Ledger told reporters he felt as content as he'd ever been. "When you're this happy," he said, "everything seems to fall into place."
The story his best movies tell is a unified story, in chapters, about connection and someone learning how to be. In the Australian drama Candy — playing a heroin addict, with all of a successful addicts sly, soft corruption — the story was about what happens when you transform other people into the means to a destination. Casanova was about how to shift from being a lover — which is abstract and general — and push ahead with the business of actually loving one person. Brokeback Mountain warned of the life where you refuse love, the costs everyone around you must pay. In I'm Not There, he played a man who had — like himself when the film was released — for reasons he could not explain but could not correct, lost his lover, family and home. As The Joker in next summer's The Dark Knight, he will appear as a man severed from all connection. A "psychopathic, mass-murdering clown with zero empathy," is how he described it to the New York Times. On set, Michael Caine said the performance sometimes turned so frightening he forgot his own lines.
When Ledger and Williams split last September, the explanation appeared to be drug use. Ledger took an apartment in SoHo and missed his daughter. Sleep became a problem. "I need to do something with this head because sometimes I just don't sleep, it just keeps ticking." He talked medications, telling the Times he was managing about two hours a night. On an evening when one Ambien didn't do the job, he swallowed a second, passed out, came to an hour later, head still whirring. On his last film set, co-star Christopher Plummer reported that Ledger didn't seem to be sleeping at all. Among the saddest images of the past month is Ledger, forty-eight hours before his death, alone at a late-night bar, hoodie hiked up, drinking through the mouth-hole of a ski mask.
It's been a time of tributes. Todd Haynes, his director on I'm Not There, paid Ledger the compliment he denied himself: "Heath was a true artist." He added, "This is an unimaginable tragedy." Ang Lee, who won the director's Academy Award for Brokeback, said "Working with Heath was one of the purest joys of my life. His death is heartbreaking." Dark Knight director Chris Nolan wrote about "charisma — as invisible and natural as gravity. That's what Heath had. I've never felt as old as I did watching Heath explore his talents." At press time, the New York Police Department has yet to settle on an official cause of death, but in a sense it's right there in front of us. Ledger made great demands on his heart — romantically, professionally, personally, physically. And in the end, his heart said "No."
From Issue No. 1046, February 21, 2008
