Heath Ledger: With his subtle, heartbreaking, Oscar-nominated performance in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, Heath Ledger, who has died suddenly aged 28, threw off his label as a teen idol and increased his fan base ten-fold.
He had come a long way, literally and figuratively, from his birthplace of Perth in Western Australia. His middle-class parents named him and his sister after Emily Brontë's lovers in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff and Catherine. He soon shortened it.
His first acting experience came at 10, when he was cast in a local production of Peter Pan. This led to roles in children's TV programmes, and a bit part in a 1992 Australian feature film, Clowning Around, starring Van Johnson.
Attending a private all-boys school called Guildford grammar, Ledger excelled as an athlete - he was captain of the Kalamunda (a suburb of Perth) hockey team. This helped him get a role in the TV series Sweat (1996), about a school for the athletically gifted, in which he played a gay cyclist - one of the few homosexual characters on Australian TV that was not effeminate. After a small part in Paws (1997), about a talking dog, and an appearance as a surfer in an episode of Home and Away, Ledger landed the leading role in the American TV series Roar (1997-2000), which was shot in Australia.
It was Ledger's Braveheart portrayal that got Hollywood interested in him. He moved to Los Angeles, where he got a part in 10 Things I Hate About You (1999). In The Patriot (2000), Ledger played Mel Gibson's eldest son. If nothing else, the film cemented Ledger's teen appeal as America's hunk of choice.
The dumb-and-dumber A Knight's Tale (2001) did nothing to dispel this view. Ledger, with his tousled blond surfer looks, could not avoid being hunk-like. With this in mind, he took the comparatively small role of the weak son of a death-row guard in Monster's Ball (2001), who vomits while escorting a condemned man to the chair.
It was back to action in The Four Feathers (2002) and a return to his homeland in Ned Kelly (2003). Neither film did anything for Ledger's acting reputation, though he continued to feature on magazine covers and gossip columns. Off-screen, he dated actors Naomi Watts, Lisa Zane and Heather Graham.
Brokeback Mountain could not have come at a better time for Ledger. This poignant story of forbidden love between two young ranch hands, played tenderly by Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, gained both actors wide admiration. Ledger is particularly effective as the more stoical and taciturn of the two.
"Bottom line is . . . we're around each other an' . . . this thing, it grabs hold of us again . . . at the wrong place . . . at the wrong time . . . and we're dead," he says, struggling to articulate his emotions.
Ledger, who recently finished playing The Joker in The Dark Knight, the new Batman movie, had proved that he was not just a pretty face. There is no doubt that he would have had an illustrious career in front of him.
He is survived by his two-year-old daughter by Michelle Williams, who played his wife in Brokeback Mountain.
Heath Ledger, actor, born April 4th, 1979; died January 22nd, 2008