Heath Ledger

Heath Ledger was born on April 4, 1979, in Perth, Western Australia. The son of Sally Ramshaw and Kim Ledger, he attended Guildford Grammar School and, as a teenager, performed in school productions. He left school at sixteen and moved to Sydney with Trevor DiCarlo to pursue acting. Ledger first became familiar to Australian television audiences through roles in the series Sweat and Roar, and he also appeared in Home and Away. His American breakthrough came as Patrick Verona in the 1999 romantic comedy 10 Things I Hate About You, a modernized high-school version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. He followed it with parts in The Patriot alongside Mel Gibson and in Monster's Ball, which starred Halle Berry. Ledger sought varied work rather than remaining a teen-idol lead. He played the bushranger Ned Kelly in Ned Kelly, opposite Naomi Watts, and portrayed a heroin-dependent poet in Candy, adapted from Luke Davies's novel. In Brokeback Mountain, directed by Ang Lee, he played Ennis Del Mar, a Wyoming ranch hand whose decades-long love affair with Jack Twist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is constrained by social expectations. The performance brought Ledger an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, making him then one of the youngest nominees in that category. In 2007, he appeared as one of several incarnations of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, playing a character called Robbie Clark. He also directed music videos and was developing filmmaking projects. Ledger's final completed feature performance was the Joker in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. His version of Batman's adversary used a scarred face, smeared makeup, and an unpredictable criminal persona; the film was released in July 2008, after his death. Ledger died on January 22, 2008, in New York City at age twenty-eight. The New York City medical examiner ruled the death an accident resulting from combined effects of prescription medications. In 2009, Ledger received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Dark Knight. His family accepted the award on his behalf, and it was one of several posthumous honors for the role. The performance also earned him a Golden Globe and a BAFTA supporting-actor award. Ledger had completed his work on Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, where Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell portrayed transformations of his character within the story's fantasy world. The film premiered in 2009 and was dedicated to Ledger.