Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Heath Ledger Remembrance Forum
Heath Ledger - News Accounts
Jeff Wrangler:
I just posted this over on the "Tributes and Obits" thread, but I'll ask the question here, too, since it's kind of newsy. Does anybody know whether Annie Proulx has issued a statement?
BBM-Cat:
I clicked on some random news article this morning and the featured picture was 'the crate' being loaded into a hearse. I could have done without seeing that and in fact, wish I hadn't. I know Heath is not inside of that crate, but it really hit home how final it really is. I sympathize with the family's very long journey back to Australia as they accompany Heath's body.
MaineWriter:
From the Sunday Telegraph, Australia
Williams sorrow for Heath
By Sarah Blake
January 26, 2008 12:00am
AS the world mourns the loss of the prodigious talent of Heath Ledger, attention has turned to the sorrow of his former partner, Michelle Ingrid Williams.
Ledger's most challenging and rewarding role was that of family man and there are fears that the loss of his greatest love may have prompted the anxiety and insomnia that could well have cost his life.
The split in September with his then-fiancee and mother of his beloved daughter, Matilda, came as a shock to many.
The couple, whose love story had played out publicly - both as co-stars on the set of Brokeback Mountain, then in a world tour promoting the film - had seemed perfectly matched.
Indeed Ledger, a wildly successful performer who clearly never wanted to be a celebrity, had been unusually forthcoming in interviews about his feelings for 27-year-old Williams.
"The level of synchronicity that's in my life now, with me and Michelle and now Matilda, has meant it's become everything to me - the most important thing I do,'' he once said, of family life.
"My child smiles up at me in the morning and that's it - I feel connected to life, this is what it's all about.
"Before, I felt like I was floating through life, like a ghost - I may not have even existed - and now I feel physical and grounded and life now is about as real as it gets. There's something very cosmic about the experience of parenthood. Suddenly, you get the right perspective and priorities.''
Ledger said he and Williams, a former child star who made her name in the soap series Dawson's Creek, had fallen for each other almost as soon as shooting started on Brokeback Mountain, in Canada.
"We were knee-deep in snow and on the fifth take, Michelle and I were tobogganing down the hill _ we were supposed to fall off, having a fun time,'' he said.
"(But) Michelle was screaming in pain. She'd twisted her knee - she was pretty much on crutches for the rest of the shoot. And I felt I always had to look after her after that.''
The romance was so swift that Williams was pregnant before the shooting finished and had given birth to Matilda before the film's release.
"Becoming a father definitely exceeds all my expectations, but I was always expecting it and a lot from it. It's marvellous - and the most remarkable experience I've ever had,'' Ledger said.
Friends and co-stars reflected last week on the powerful bond that the pair had shared.
Screenwriter Luke Davies, whose film Candy was the first shoot Ledger took part in after Brokeback Mountain, wrote of their obvious bond during a night in Sydney.
"He seemed, at times, quite literally beside himself with love for her, unable to contain his excitement,'' Davies wrote last week.
"I remember one night during pre-production, in an almost empty nightclub in Kings Cross, watching him sweep her to her feet and swirl her around an empty dance floor, much to the relief of a bored DJ.
"It was a completely private moment - he wasn't doing it for the benefit of others, those of us settling into our seats or buying a round.
"He wanted to dance with Williams. He seemed to carry that same I-can't-believe-it-can-feel-like-this grin from 10 Things I Hate About You.
"I had the odd sensation, watching them, that their experience at just that moment was a little more intense than mine. I almost felt the need to avert my eyes - that pure joy again.''
Williams was not just his lover - she became his defender, after a nasty run-in with paparazzi photographers spurred the pair to move out of their Bronte home, in search of privacy in New York City.
The young star who, like Ledger, was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Brokeback Mountain, had the grief of his death etched across her face in grainy photographs taken a day after her former partner's shock death.
Williams had been in Trollhattan, Sweden, where she had been shooting scenes for the upcoming film Mammoth, when she was told.
It is not known why their love story fell apart. Neither has spoken about it publicly.
Even in a world of cynical movie-star romances, their relationship seemed special.
Those moments on the red carpet, when they looked at one another and smiled, seemed to have extra intensity.
But like so many relationships in the glare of public life, it just simply crumbled.
At the time of the separation, there was no official statement - just confirmation of the break-up from a "source'' to a US tabloid magazine.
Saying the relationship had been troubled for some time, the "friend'' said the pair had simply grown apart.
Ledger moved out of the Brooklyn townhouse that he and Williams shared, into the SoHo, Manhattan, apartment where he was to die.
He still spent time with his daughter, but filled his other hours with long periods of socialising and a frenetic work schedule.
Since Ledger's death, reports have emerged of a complicated web of relationships with a series of glamorous women.
The number and beauty of these women is not unlike those who played a role in Michael Hutchence's life before his untimely death in Sydney in November, 1997.
Hutchence's partner, Paula Yates, never recovered from his death and died of an accidental heroin overdose at the age of 40, in September, 2000.
The death of Yates left their daughter, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily Hutchence, an orphan.
Much younger than Yates, Williams must now confront her own grief, the public outpouring for her ex-fiance - and the women who filled his days in her absence.
It is a lot to ask of a 27-year-old single mother.
Ledger's close-knit family, devastated over his death, has promised to keep looking out for the little girl whom he loved so much.
"You lived life with courage and daring and we are so grateful for the wonderful times we shared,'' his mother, Sally, wrote in one of a number of heart-rending death notices in The West Australian newspaper on Friday. "We will be there for Matilda.''
Let's hope there is as much consideration for Williams.
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23113951-5009160,00.html?from=mostpop
MaineWriter:
From Entertainment Weekly:
Did Heath Ledger finish vocals on 'Dark Knight'?
Jan 26, 2008, 03:49 PM | by Kristen Baldwin
Categories: Movie Biz
While the late Heath Ledger's family and friends tend to the sad details of his burial this weekend, a debate is ripping through Internet fan sites about what will stand as Ledger's last completed film, Batman: The Dark Knight (due to open on July 17th). The burning question is, how complete was Ledger's post-production work on the maniacal character of the Joker?
On Jan. 25th, E! Online gossip columnist Ted Casablanca posted an item quoting a "studio insider" saying that Ledger had done "zero" post-production looping on the movie. (Typically, an actor re-records many lines for a film long after principal photography wraps, in a process called "automated dialogue replacement," or ADR. It's an especially extensive process when many shots have been filmed on location, since all kinds of incidental noise can interfere with the dialogue's clarity and can require up to three-quarters of the lines to be re-performed on a dubbing stage, with the actor looking up at the film images and matching his or her own mouth movements.) But Ledger's vocals are perfectly clear in the bits of footage so far released—trailers and a prologue bank-robbery sequence shown with IMAX prints of I Am Legend. Fan websites like Ain't-It-Cool-News, Superherohype.com and Batman-on-Film.com are full of assertions contrary to the Casablanca report, saying that in fact Ledger was done with all significant looping. Ledger himself, while promoting the Todd Haynes film I'm Not There last fall, had said he was finished with his work on Dark Knight.
Still, given the way post-production schedules usually run on mega-budget superhero films, it's not out of the realm of possibility that director Chris Nolan might have wanted to call on Ledger for limited additional sessions with more than six months to go before opening weekend. Directors often decide to insert new bits of dialogue in post-production for the sake of clarity and economy. Doing anything like that now with Ledger's Dark Knight role would require hiring another voice actor to emulate his speaking voice, or creating a complicated mash-up from Ledger's existing dialogue tracks. (Both of these alternate approaches have been taken in similar past situations, as when Oliver Reed passed away before the completion of Gladiator and James Dean died before the release of Giant.)
Dark Knight director Chris Nolan and execs at Warner Bros., the studio releasing the film, were not available for comment, and have not issued any public statements about the status of the movie. EW placed a call to Oscar-winning sound designer and sound editor Richard King, who's handling the Dark Knight audio work, but he declined to comment. According to several other sound-mixing experts who also declined to speak on the record, there's no way to tell what the situation is with Dark Knight from the outside, since the amount of ADR required, and the timetable for doing it, varies wildly between films. (In plenty of instances, looping is not completed until very close to the final release date, perhaps as little as a month or two out.) Ledger had been working in London on Terry Gilliam's film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which meant he was close to Dark Knight director Chris Nolan's home turf and might well have been available if needed.
Warner Bros. has temporarily pulled back on some of the promotional material centered on Ledger's creepy whiteface makup as the Joker, keyed to the tagline "Why So Serious"? It remains to be confirmed whether the film's technical wrapup will require a new game plan as well. —Steve Daly
http://hollywoodinsider.ew.com/2008/01/did-heath-ledge.html
Aloysius J. Gleek:
Confirmed: People Only Celeb Weekly To Have Heath Ledger Cover
Huffington Post | Rachel Sklar | January 23, 2008 12:29 PM
As surmised in my earlier post, People magazine will be the only celebrity weekly to have a cover featuring actor Heath Ledger, whose death was discovered late yesterday afternoon — too late to feature on other celebrity weekly covers, whose editions closed on Monday night and which will now be on newsstands all week without mention of the sad news. Nat Ives at AdAge has more details, as well as the cover image which we've reproduced here.
http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=123270
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