Heath Heath Heath

[ifyoucantfixit]

      That does seem to be the case.   

[Ellemeno]

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Acting's therapy for heartthrob Heath Ledger
'I get to scream and cry ... I get to purge myself,' says Aussie star. 'Once the film is over, I throw it all away'


November 18, 2007
BY CINDY PEARLMAN
Heath Ledger is one heartthrob who is all there. The 28-year-old Aussie with the sleepy eyes and mop of messy blond hair is the first one to admit that acting is therapy for him and he brings everything pent up inside of himself to the big screen.

"I'm lucky in a sense because I have a job where I get to scream and cry," he says. "I get to purge myself in ways that don't really affect me personally.

"When the director yells cut, I just walk out the door and I'm back into my regular life," he says.

Of course, nothing has been regular about Ledger's life since he came on the scene in the teen romance "10 Things I Hate About You" and then received raves years later in "Brokeback Mountain." These days he's starring for director Todd Haynes in his ambitious new film about the many lives of singer, poet and American icon Bob Dylan called "I'm Not There."

Ledger joins a stellar cast including Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere and Ben Whishaw, who each play Dylan at different parts of his life. Ledger's slice of all things Dylan comes by playing the music man during his star days when he could be found at parties with other beautiful people. On the streets this Dylan hid behind sunglasses and wanted to be left alone because he wasn't always so happy. His private life couldn't withstand the hoopla of his stardom.

"The film doesn't sum up Dylan's life or try to explain it all," Ledger says. "We're just representing aspects of his life during different periods of it."

Ledger says that he loved the idea of playing Dylan. "I found the connection obviously through his music," Ledger says. "You can't help but fall in love with his lyrics or should I say his poetry?"

To get into character, Ledger was given photos of Dylan that were from the mid '60s when the rocker spent his time in New York City hanging out and trying to avoid the press with his dark glasses that also blotted out the rest of the world. Everyone involved in the film is quick to caution that they're not exactly playing Dylan as Dylan but a vision of him or a Dylanesque sort of character.

"It was an incredible experience," Ledger says. "I consider (director) Todd Haynes to be a genius."

Ledger won't rate all the Dylans in the film, but mentions that Blanchett blew him away. "Cate has given such an incredible transformation," Ledger says. "She will really blow people away. I mean, she walks, talks, sings and smells like Bob Dylan."

Ledger will also play The Joker in the upcoming "The Dark Knight" due out in July of 2008.

"I was a fan of the comic book character," Ledger says of The Joker. "Somewhere inside of me, I kind of knew instantly that I wanted to do it. I didn't feel like I had to search for it.

"I felt like I had a plan of attack with it," he says. "That usually dictates whether I want to do something or not -- if I have an understanding of it straight away."

He says that the film "is the most fun I've ever had with a character and the most fun I probably ever will have even though at the end of the day I was absolutely wrecked." He adds that his Joker "has zero empathy" for Batman or anyone else in Gotham City. Ledger's intention from the start was to be the fierce, scary Joker. "He's really full of surprises. But I can say that I wanted him to be very sinister."

Ledger was born in Perth in Western Australia. As his story goes, he was required in school to take either acting or cooking as an elective. "I absolutely couldn't cook," Ledger insists.

Ledger made his American debut in the film "Two Hands" (1999), but became a teen heartthrob with "10 Things I Hate About You" (1999). He decided to buck that image with films including "The Patriot" (2000), "Monster's Ball" (2001) and "Ned Kelly" (2003).

He says that indie films are one of his favorites these days. "I think you're generally granted more freedom," Ledger says. "Whether or not you have a better outcome is relative to the person making the film. But I think that generally, if it's money coming from an alternate source other than a studio then you have that freedom.

"Lower budgets mean you're actually forced into using your imagination. You don't have everything at your fingertips and create it from scratch," he says.

He laments that most of the people he wants to work with aren't around anymore. "Look, most of them are dead," Ledger says. "Fellini. Cassavettes. Bob Fosse. Stanley Kubrick. I would have loved to work with them. I would love to work with many people who are around, but they're not lining up just yet. Terrence Malick is one person who comes to mind. I would love to be in one of his visual poems."

He is recently split with actress Michelle Williams and the two share parenting of their toddler daughter Matilda. Ledger says parenthood has changed his life, but not in sappy ways. "I didn't immediately get an urge to go out and be a voice in an animated film," he jokes. "But it definitely changes the person that you are. I think your personal evolution runs hand in hand with your professional evolution.

"So fatherhood has changed me as an artist because I feel things on a deeper level," he says. "I think my performances will grow simultaneously."

Ledger lives in New York City where he can often be seen pushing Matilda around in her buggy.

"I kind of save the living for the time between action and cut," Ledger says. "I'm pretty good at dropping a character once it's over for the day. Certainly once the film is over, I throw it all away. Your life is what matters."

Big Picture News Inc.

http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/pearlman/656693,SHO-Sunday-ledger18.article

[oilgun]

[...] "I didn't immediately get an urge to go out and be a voice in an animated film," he jokes.
[...]
http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/pearlman/656693,SHO-Sunday-ledger18.article[/color]

Thank god for that!   You know it's over when an actor does that.. the espression jumping the shark comes to mind.

Thanks for posting this!

[David In Indy]

Hahaha Oilgun! Spot-on!

But David told me that the last time he watched the movie, his dog paid more attention to it!  

David! What does our dear Jack do all the time, what does he use to annoy Ennis?

It's true. I think my damn dog is in love with Jake. God, what did I do to deserve this?

He perks his head up and sticks out his tongue every time he hears Jake's voice. Shouldn't we be discussing this on the Jake Jake Jake thread? 

    

[David In Indy]

What does our dear Jack do all the time, what does he use to annoy Ennis?

[mvansand76]

Hahaha, your dog is the cutest ever!

Love the screenshot, sweetie!

[jstephens9]

I'm hoping I am not posting this twice since I have not been able to read all of this thread yet. However, if I am, please forgive me. This is from redbookmag.com.



Star Dads We Love

Dad most likely to do dinner -- and the dishes: Heath Ledger

Age: 28.

Kid: Matilda, 20 months.

Why we love him: Heath's been one of Hollywood's hotties since his 2001 appearance in A Knight's Tale, but his favorite role is daddy -- he's reportedly said he wants at least five more children with fiancee Michelle Williams, 26.

Does he have a single brother? Shortly after Matilda was born, Heath told reporters, "My duties in life are that I wake up, cook breakfast, clean the dishes, prepare lunch, clean those dishes, go to the market, get fresh produce, cook dinner, clean those dishes, and then sleep if I can. And I love it. I actually adore it."
******************************************************************************

I assume this was written before Heath's breakup with Michelle; however, regardless of that I am always glad to read what a good, down to earth guy he is. He sure doesn't sound like a typical movie star, does he? Heath, you're wonderful  Now, how would everyone like to spending Thanksgiving with Heath Ledger 

[NavyVet]

Wow ... all that money and he does his own dishes?  Hard to believe.

[Ellemeno]

Jack, thanks for posting that Redbook piece! 

[belbbmfan]

I found this review of I'm Not There on the New York Times website.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/11/21/movies/21ther.html?ref=movies

Another Side of Bob Dylan, and Another, and Another ...

   
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: November 21, 2007

From Andy Warhol to Lonelygirl15, modern media culture thrives on the traffic in counterfeit selves. In this world the greatest artist will also be, almost axiomatically, the biggest fraud. And looking back over the past 50 years or so, it is hard to find anyone with a greater ability to synthesize authenticity — to give his serial hoaxes and impersonations the ring of revealed and esoteric truth — than Bob Dylan.

It’s not just that Robert Zimmerman, a Jewish teenager growing up in Eisenhower-era Minnesota, borrowed a name from a Welsh poet and the singing style of an Oklahoma Dust Bowl troubadour and bluffed his way into the New York folk scene. That was chutzpah. What followed was genius — the elaboration of an enigmatic, mercurial personality that seemed entirely of its moment and at the same time connected to a lost agrarian past. From the start, Mr. Dylan has been singularly adept at channeling and recombining various strands of the American musical and literary vernacular, but he has often seemed less like an interpreter of those traditions than like their incarnation.

His persona has been as inclusive as Walt Whitman’s and as unsettlingly splintered as that of Herman Melville’s Confidence Man. Vulnerable as Mr. Dylan is to misunderstanding (“I couldn’t believe after all these years/You didn’t know me better than that” in “Idiot Wind”), he also actively solicits it (“Something is happening here/But you don’t know what it is/Do you, Mr. Jones?” in “Ballad of a Thin Man”). So it is only fitting that Todd Haynes, in “I’m Not There,” his incandescent rebus of a movie inspired by Mr. Dylan’s life and music, has chosen to multiply puzzles and paradoxes rather than solve them. Not for nothing does one of Mr. Haynes’s stories take place in a town called Riddle.

Among its many achievements, Mr. Haynes’s film hurls a Molotov cocktail through the facade of the Hollywood biopic factory, exploding the literal-minded, anti-intellectual assumptions that guide even the most admiring cinematic explorations of artists’ lives. Rather than turn out yet another dutiful, linear chronicle of childhood trauma and grown-up substance abuse, Mr. Haynes has produced a dizzying palimpsest of images and styles, in which his subject appears in the form of six different people.

Not one is named Bob Dylan (or Robert Zimmerman), though all of them evoke actual and invented points in the Dylan cosmos: Billy the Kid, Woody Guthrie, the Mighty Quinn. They’re not all musicians: One is a poet named Arthur Rimbaud; another is a movie star.

These divergent visions of Dylan are played by two different Australians (Heath Ledger and Cate Blanchett); a young British actor (Ben Whishaw); a prepubescent African-American named Marcus Carl Franklin; Richard Gere; and the most recent Batman. Their stories collide and entwine, adding up to an experience that is as fascinating and inexhaustible as listening to “Blood on the Tracks” or “The Basement Tapes.”

It is unusual to see a masterwork emerge from one artist’s absorption with the work of another, though Mr. Haynes came close with “Far From Heaven,” his 2002 homage to the director Douglas Sirk. And while “I’m Not There” is immersed in Dylanology, it is more than a document of scholarly preoccupation or fan obsession.

Devotees of Dylan lore will find their heads swimming with footnotes, as they track Mr. Haynes’s allusions not only to Mr. Dylan’s own music but also to the extensive secondary literature it has inspired, from books by David Hajdu and Greil Marcus to films, including D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary, “Don’t Look Back,” some of which Mr. Haynes remakes shot for shot.

But the film is anything but dry, and like Mr. Dylan’s best songs, it is at once teasingly arcane and bracingly plain-spoken. Mr. Haynes, switching styles, colors, film stocks and editing rhythms with unnerving ease (and with the crucial help of Jay Rabinowitz and Edward Lachman, the editor and the director of photography), has held his cerebral and his visceral impulses in perfect balance. “I’m Not There” respects the essential question Mr. Dylan’s passionate followers have always found themselves asking — What does it mean? — without forgetting that the counter-question Mr. Dylan has posed is more challenging and, for a movie, more important: How does it feel?

As you watch the mid-’60s renegade folk singer Jude Quinn — embodied in Ms. Blanchett’s hunched, skinny frame and photographed in silvery Nouvelle Vague black and white — pinball through swinging London, subsisting on amphetamines, Camel straights and gnomic talk, it feels like a pop earthquake. The ’60s, man! As Mr. Ledger’s character and his wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) meet, marry and fall apart, it feels like the heartbreaking aftermath of a moment of high promise and possibility. (That would be the ’70s.)

Riding the rails in 1959 with a pint-size, wisecracking hobo who calls himself Woody Guthrie (Mr. Franklin) and saddling up with Mr. Gere’s Billy the Kid in Riddle, Mo., in the 19th century, you feel a piercing nostalgia for a pastoral America that probably existed only in legend. With Christian Bale, playing a star of the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene who resurfaces as a Pentecostal minister in Los Angeles years later, you experience a prickle of confusion and morbid curiosity. As it all unfolds, there may be other feelings too, including awe at the quality of the performances and occasional exasperation at Mr. Haynes’s sprawling, hectic virtuosity.

Still, I would not subtract a minute of this movie, or wish it any different. Nor do I anticipate being finished with “I’m Not There” anytime soon, since, like “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” it invites endless interpretation, criticism and elaboration. Instead of proposing a definitive account of Bob Dylan’s career, Mr. Haynes has used that career as fuel for a wide-ranging (and, if you’ll permit me, freewheeling) historical inquiry into his own life and times. In spite of its title, “I’m Not There” is a profoundly, movingly personal film, passionate in its engagement with the mysteries of the recent past.

“Live in your own time.” That’s the advice young “Woody Guthrie” hears from a motherly woman who offers him a hot meal and a place to sleep. It’s sensible advice — he’s daydreaming of the Depression in the middle of the space age — but also useless. It’s not as if anyone has a choice. To slog through the present requires no particular wit, vision or art. But a certain kind of artist will comb through the old stuff that’s lying around — the tall tales and questionable memories, the yellowing photographs and scratched records — looking for glimpses of a possible future. Though there’s a lot of Bob Dylan’s music in “I’m Not There,” Mr. Haynes is not simply compiling golden oldies. You hear familiar songs, but what you see is the imagination unleashed — the chimes of freedom flashing.