Heath Ledger's long journey from Perth to Hollywood comes up short
BY DAVID COHEN IN PERTH AND ETHAN SACKS IN NEW YORK
Saturday, July 19th 2008, 4:00 AM
There are 11,625 miles and 28 years separating the shaded suburb of Perth, Australia, where Heath Ledger was born, and the downtown Manhattan loft where he was found dead on Jan. 22, but the gulf seems much wider.
On that afternoon, the actor's housekeeper discovered Ledger's lifeless body – the tragic result of what was later ruled by the New York City Medical Examiner as an accidental overdose of prescription drugs, including sleeping pills, pain killers and anti-depressants. Somehow, the actor whom friends, family and fellow Hollywood collaborators all describe as larger than life managed to become best known for his senseless death.
Ledger, who made it across the world on his looks and then overcame them with talent and the determination to avoid typecasting, left one final onscreen legacy: "The Dark Knight," the critically acclaimed superhero movie that's set to break box office records this weekend.
"I think he was a talented actor, who clearly had an intelligence and a curiosity to try different things and not be straight-jacketed into some Hollywood mould," said Leonard Maltin, the film historian and movie critic for "Entertainment Tonight." "I admired him for that."
"I would imagine that people will fall in love with Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker," said Shekhar Kapur, who became friends with Ledger after directing the then-22-year-old in 2002's "The Four Feathers."
Privately, Ledger confided to friends that the sinister Joker, the schizophrenic mass-murderer he plays in "The Dark Knight," represented the biggest challenge of his career.
"There was something about Heath that he would not ever do a part that he could not identify with, and part of his struggle must have been how do you identify with the Joker - and that must have been pretty chilling and tiring," said Kapur, who last talked to his friend by cell-phone just before Ledger went to sleep on the night of Jan. 21.
Thirty-one days before his death, childhood friend Jane Wishaw remembers seeing the Hollywood star for the last time at the swank Il Lido Italian Canteen on Perth's Cottesloe Beach. It was three days before Christmas, and Ledger was in town – with model Gemma Ward in tow - to surprise his mother Sally with an unexpected visit.
"He was very gleeful when he told me about the surprise," Wishaw said. "We talked about his family and his current roles."
But the upbeat Ledger grew somber when the talk turned to "The Dark Knight," which he'd finished filming.
"He looked a bit sad then," Wishaw says. "He was unsettled when he talked about The Joker. He seemed emotionally tired. Being away from his daughter Matilda affected him … when we talked about The Joker he went slack."
Gotham City, both the real and the fictional one, is on the other side of the Earth from the actor's hometown of Perth in Western Australia. A state capital of 1.5 million people, it feels more like a big country town than a big city.
Perhaps that's because it's closer to the Indonesian island of Bali than to Sydney. The last time most Americans would have heard of Perth is 25 years ago, when a boat from the city's yacht club won the America's Cup. Though the city boasts other famous actors as exports - Melissa George and Isla Fisher, a.k.a. Mrs. Borat – Heath Ledger was its favorite son.
The feeling was mutual.
Haydn Ledger, one of Heath's uncles, recalled how his daughter, Jess, and Heath would go out for a beer whenever the star was home.
"They're the same age and went to pubs in [inner-city] Northbridge," Haydn Ledger said. "Heath never had any money on him, but he always got a beer.
"Perth was a good sanctuary for him – a good hideaway. It helped we're in the most isolated city in the world."
There's a photo of Heath – the son of a French teacher and race car designer - in a school yearbook that friends and family say sums him up perfectly. In it the then-dashing 16-year-old is playing field hockey for Guildford Grammar School, running with the ball, his head bowed in concentration.
Ledger was a good student at Guildford – one of Western Australia's oldest and most exclusive private schools - for nearly ten years.
"He played hockey for the state and he was also a very talented cricketer," says headmaster Bob Zordan. In fact, staff members say he was good at everything he tried – especially when he turned his attention to performing. His dramatic debut was as Laertes in a school production of Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Shortly thereafter, Ledger got himself an agent, followed quickly by a role as a gay cyclist in a short-lived TV series called "Sweat."
"I remember his agonizing over whether to take that role," Zordan says. "Ultimately the opportunity proved too great to resist and he never looked back."
Within a couple of years Ledger was a working actor in the United States. But he never forgot his old teachers: after his first major starring Hollywood role, in "10 Things I Hate About You," he sent the school a huge framed poster of himself, complete with signature.
"We watched the ride with wonder, but his life was cut ridiculously short," Zordan says.
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Ledger never forgot his old friends after hitting the big time, either. When a fellow classmate,
N'fa Forster-Jones, became a rap star, his old school buddy, Heath, came back to direct two of his music videos.
One Perth entertainment insider said that his quick success with "Sweat" made the young Ledger a fixture on the hard-partying scene – a dabbler in drugs.
"Everyone there was like that, it was young people's stuff, but he was clearly the leader of the gang," the source said.
Despite the drug use, Ledger seemingly could do no wrong – and showing the same drive clearly visible in the field hockey photo, he embarked on Hollywood, determined to go from the Land Down Under to the center of the movie universe.
Disney's head of casting, Marcia Ross, remembers vividly when Ledger, then a nobody on this side of the Pacific, first walked in to compete with hundreds of other aspiring actors at a reading for "10 Things I Hate About You," in early 1998. His only American credit to date was a TV pilot for Fox, which put him in the company of hundreds of other hopefuls. He was just shy of his 19th birthday, but he wasn't shy about much else.
"The thing I remember about him was that he was of course gorgeous, but not it a way you've seen before," says Ross. "He was a young guy, but he had a manly quality about him. There was a maturity about him. There was a breezy self confidence about him.
"You just know that's it, that no one else could play that part."
Ledger didn't particularly want to play that part again. After the movie came out in 1999, the Aussie actor was flooded with offers for similar teen romantic comedies. He passed. And passed. Until he got the chance to star alongside one of his childhood heroes, fellow Australian import Mel Gibson, in 2001's "The Patriot."
That role, as the hot-tempered son of a reluctant hero in the U.S. Revolutionary War, started the ball rolling. His next big gig was a critically-lauded supporting part in "Monster's Ball," as a death row prison guard, a performance Variety called a "short, cold, cruel portrait of a young man with no center." In other words, it was a far cry from any of his previous screen turns, not to mention from Heath Ledger himself.
Ross called Ledger "a character actor trapped in a leading man's body." He did accept one gig as a concession to his romantic lead looks: "A Knight's Tale," a rock n' roll medieval movie that was supposed to make him a star. Ledger was reportedly as uncomfortable making the popcorn flick as some critics were sitting through it.
When Kapur cast him in "The Four Feathers" after an eight-hour screen test, the Indian director best known for the "Elizabeth" movies thought the young actor had the eyes of a "wise old soul." But more importantly for fans who might think Heath Ledger was too much of a pretty boy for the Joker, he had the physicality of an action star, Kapur said.
"He was incredibly agile," said Kapur. "I've never seen an actor that had that kind of capacity for action. He was so quick and so athletic, and this despite the fact that he smoked a lot." One of Kapur's favorite memories of Heath Ledger was during the filming of "The Four Feathers" in 2001, for a scene in which his character has to fall off a horse in the midst of twenty galloping steeds, then get up, run, and leap onto the back of another rider less horse.
The original plan was to shoot Ledger feigning a fall off his mount, then cut to the actor on the ground before making another quick cut. After each of those cuts, a stuntman would be filmed doing the actual dangerous work. Ledger insisted that it would be easier and look better on camera if he did the stunt himself.
"The guy just did it," said Kapur, still marveling to this day. "He fell off the horse, sat down, the galloping horses, the ones without riders, galloped by [him.] He then ran along the horse and then jumped on and he did it in one shot.
"He just jumped on. For a moment there was an absolutely stunned silence and then the whole [set] broke out in cheers."
After "The Four Feathers" flopped at the box office in 2002, Ledger returned to his roots to play the titular real-life Australian outlaw in "Ned Kelly." It was that film that also kindled a two-year romance with co-star Naomi Watts.
Ledger may have hated the Hollywood pose, but he sure loved seducing beautiful starlets. Before Watts, there was a 2001 high-profile romance with actress Heather Graham, almost ten years his senior. And later, the actor's live-in relationship with "Brokeback Mountain" co-star Michelle Williams, which produced a daughter, Matilda Rose.
After the breakup with Williams, Ledger either consoled himself by dating Helena Christensen, or just remained "friends" with the leggy supermodel, depending on which gossip rag one believes. The exact same innuendoes were reported at the exact same time regarding another model, Gemma Ward.
His dalliances made it hard for him to shake his Hollywood heartthrob image; at least until lovelorn cowboy Ennis Del Mar first rode, slump-shouldered, onto the screen in 2005's "Brokeback Mountain."
That proved to be the year it all came together for Ledger, starting with Terry Gilliam's quirky dark fairy tale, "The Brothers Grimm," in which he co-starred with Matt Damon. His streak continued with "Brokeback Mountain," for which Ledger was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. He capped off 2005 with a little-seen but critically-hailed turn in the title role of the period comedy "Cassanova."
"Up to that point I'd been in a really self-destructive mode with my career – quite intentionally, actually," Ledger had told Entertainment Weekly.
After all his Hollywood success, Ledger sightings were still common in Perth.
In 2001 he brought then-girlfriend Heather Graham home and showed her the local sights. At the speedway races south of the city, Ledger and his starlet girlfriend dined on French fries and then he impressed her further as he zoomed around the track himself. A few years later, he took Michelle Williams to the local botanical garden for a romantic walk.
Three years ago, Ledger and Williams eschewed Hollywood for Brooklyn, New York – settling in the nicest brownstone on a tree-lined block that's right out of the opening of the "Cosby Show."
Sure, there were the occasional paparazzi lurking to snap photos of the couple pushing daughter Matilda in a stroller to the oasis of gourmet cookie shops and eateries a couple of blocks away. But otherwise the couple could mingle with their fellow Brooklynites in relative anonymity – as close to "normal life" as a pair of high profile actors could possibly hope for.
Neighbors recall Ledger as a doting dad, and Matilda's name can still be seen etched in a concrete patch outside the family's olive green brownstone as if it were the front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre.
"This neighborhood seemed to suit his personality, which was certainly unique given his high profile," said Zach Zook, manager of the Book Court bookstore, a regular neighborhood haunt for Ledger and Williams. "He wouldn't get bothered walking down the street [like he would in Hollywood.]"
An avid chess player since childhood, Ledger also discovered the chess tables at Washington Square Park in Manhattan where hucksters and masters face off against upstart challengers.
A regular at the tables, who claimed to have played against Ledger a couple of months ago, had this to say: "It wasn't like Elvis Presley or Michael Jackson blew through the park, nobody really recognized him. He seemed like just a really nonchalant, happy go-lucky guy." That happiness, however, was fleeting. Depending on whom one finds more believable – publicists or gossip magazines – Williams and Ledger broke up last September because of his philandering, his recreational drug use, the pressures of fame, or simply amicable differences.
Ledger moved into the SoHo loft where he would be found dead months later, and by all accounts struggled with being separated from his daughter. He threw himself into his work, casually dated at least one supermodel and loitered in the nightclub circuit.
The one thing he didn't do was sleep.
"Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night," Ledger told the New York Times in a now famous interview last November. "I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going."
He told the Times that he had taken a double dose of Ambien sleeping pills one night and, according to the article, "fell into a stupor, only to wake up an hour later, his mind still racing."
That carelessness with prescription drugs would be his undoing.
The email alert sent out by the New York Police Department read: "ON TUESDAY, 1/22/08, AT APPROXIMATELY 1530 HOURS, IN THE CONFINES OF THE 5 PRECINCT, POLICE RESPONDED TO 421 BROOME STREET AND FOUND A M/W/28 UNCONSCIOUS. THE VICTIM WAS PRONOUNCED DOA AT THE SCENE."
Ledger, who shied away from the spotlight off the set, would have cringed to see the media circus he left in his wake.
On that day before Christmas in Perth, Jane Wishaw asked Ledger what he was going to do next.
"What do you suggest?" she recalled him telling her.
"Hercules," she replied.
"No way: I'm really lazy when it comes to exercise," he responded.
"I poked his arms and said, ‘anything's possible in the movies'," Wishaw said.
"We laughed, and I thought he'd come a long way from the boy who used to be told off for running through the neighbor's lawn sprinkler."
Exactly six weeks after that conversation, Wishaw found herself at Cottesloe Beach again, this time watching Michelle Williams, actress Rose Byrne and dozens of other mourners at Ledger's wake frolic in the surf as the sun went down.
Earlier, some 750 mourners at his memorial service, at a private girls school in Perth, listened to Bob Dylan's 'The Times They Are A-Changin' – the favorite song of the actor who had recently played Dylan himself in director Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There."
Ledger's eight-year-old half-sister Olivia was overcome by the event and had to be taken away in an ambulance.
"His death was so devastating on so many levels," Wishaw says, echoing the thoughts of millions.
Now he has just one final legacy – "The Dark Knight." Warner Brothers, buoyed by critics' unanimous praise, are reportedly planning an Oscar campaign for next year's Best Supporting Actor award.
"I think [his death] adds poignancy to the experience of watching any of his films from this point on, because you have to get past that barrier of forgetting his tragic death," said Maltin.
That may be Heath Ledger's greatest act of all.
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