Heath Ledger (1979 - 2008) : Rolling Stone

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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 1046 — February 21, 2008]

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