Pictures are hard to come by, but here's another interview article...
He turned down role of Hollywood hunk
Heath Ledger went for riskier parts, and won an Oscar nomination
MARK DE LA VINA
San Jose Mercury News
He was in line to become Hollywood's next top romantic lead, a blossoming hunk primped for mainstream superstardom.
Australian actor Heath Ledger seemed positioned as the next "it" boy after such box-office hits as "The Patriot" in 2000 and "A Knight's Tale" in 2001. But when most of his contemporaries were struggling with college midterms, Ledger was doing the unthinkable: abandoning a sure-fire film career for one dotted with commercially risky roles.
This conscious change in course perhaps culminated in "Brokeback Mountain," for which Ledger received a 2006 Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a ranch hand secretly in love with a bull rider (Jake Gyllenhaal).
Now Ledger, 27, has taken on another audience-testing role in "Candy," a dark memoir about a young couple locked in a death tango with heroin. The film also stars Geoffrey Rush and Abbie Cornish. It does not yet have a scheduled opening in Charlotte.
"I think it was more or less the time I decided to take my career into my own hands," Ledger says in a phone interview from a New York hotel room. "I felt like it was a little out of my control. I'm happy I made that choice. I feel less like a product and more like someone who is kind of devoted to telling stories about all walks of life."
In "Candy," Ledger plays Dan, a poet who falls for a striking young art student (Cornish). Their passion for one another becomes entangled with an all-consuming need for heroin, which inevitably envelops their relationship.
Ledger chose to work on "Candy," a small Australian film with limited U.S. release, not only because it plunged into territory of such unfamiliar darkness. The movie, shot in Sydney, also gave him the rare opportunity to make a film in his homeland. As a result, it was his first film in eight years where he didn't have to affect an accent.
Within two years of catching the attention of American audiences in "10 Things I Hate About You" (1999), Ledger's performance in the racially charged "Monster's Ball" set the tone for his choices in often offbeat, art-house movies. Such films as "Ned Kelly" and "The Brothers Grimm" followed suit.
In his next film, Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There," he plays one of seven characters who embody an aspect of Bob Dylan's life and work -- hardly the stuff of multiplexes.
Though he appears to be following singing songwriter Neil Young's career path of forsaking the middle of the road for the ditch -- leading to the rougher but far more interesting ride -- Ledger hasn't completely turned his back on popcorn movies. He will play the Joker in "The Dark Knight," Christopher Nolan's follow-up to "Batman Begins," which begins shooting in March.
The actor says that in spite of the box-office potential of "Knight," he's intrigued more by the role, which he describes as a "pure anarchist."
"I still feel like it's a character I've never done before," he says, "and I'm going to be donning a mask. I'm not really thinking about the commercial consequences. Maybe I should be. But at this point, it's just an exciting next step."