Heath Ledger (1979 - 2008)

He 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?' "