Heath Ledger, Dead At 28, Showed Bright Colors

Hearing of Heath Ledger's untimely death immediately brought the thought, from my journalist's acquaintanceship with him, that this was a guy with vivid colors. Not just in the artsy or New Age sense, though those are applicable enough, but literally. I was in an elevator at a press junket--inevitably, at the Four Seasons--the first time I laid eyes on him, in the early summer of 2000. He was in a cadmium-yellow shirt and burnt-orange pants, with a full shock of unruly, corn-colored hair. He'd just leapt, unaccompanied, onto the elevator I was ascending in, (I snapped alert like a dog does when dive-bombed by a fly, which made him grin). I didn't mention the interview we had scheduled--why undercut such joie de vivre? --as I knew it would be his last of the day and I had two producers, the director and Mel Gibson to speak with first. (The film was The Patriot, much touted, then treated to mixed reviews, but generally seen as Ledger's jumping-off point to stardom. As I learned from what he told me over beers in the garden bar at dusk for that Entertainment Weekly article:

Heath Ledger feared he might not make it past day 1. The rangy 21-year-old Aussie (10 Things I Hate About You) plays Martin's son Gabriel, a rebellious, battle-thirsty 18-year-old enlisted man who ends up riding on raids with his father and a ragtag band of fighters. Ledger says he prides himself on his self-reliance (he left home at 16 because "I was in such a hurry to experience life--to create a soul--and the only way to do that was to put myself out in the arena in the middle of a pack of lions"), but he began his experience on The Patriot certain that he had muffed his audition. Partway through it he announced, "I'm really embarrassed, but I have to leave because I'm wasting your time and I'm wasting my time," and hurriedly left. "I guess they were curious," he adds, "'cause they called back and said, 'Come in, show us what you can really do.'"

For the film's September 1999 start, he arrived to shoot his first scene in a state of subdued panic. "I hadn't been in front of a camera in a year, and I'm facing Mel Gibson," he says. "I went to Dean and said, 'You've got to understand I'm freaked out.' I was delusional. But after one day I saw that Mel was super-relaxed--then it was a walk in the park."

Ledger would make a career of reconciling seemingly dangerous opposites--to stand in the frame with his native Australia's biggest star export was to risk oblivion, but he instead gained heft. To step into the part of a miserable purveyor of misery in Monster's Ball was to risk hearty dislike, but he gained depth. To portray a cowboy in love with another cowboy was more perilous than the subsequent film's success, and Ledger's Oscar nomination, would make it seem. And to step into the size 19 spats that Jack Nicholson wore as The Joker by playing a more frenziedly sick villain in Christopher Nolan's new Batman film, The Dark Knight, which opens July 18--well, the opposite hardly matters now. The man in the bright nightgown has pulled him offstage (and out of the highly experimental-sounding Terry Gilliam feature, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus he'd mostly finished shooting in England, though The Guardian reports that blue -screen scenes remained to be shot in Vancouver).

I'd meet him again in May of 2001 for a feature in W pegged to his work in A Knight's Tale at the house he'd recently bought in the Hollywood Hills He'd just been chosen by the nation's exhibitors as the "Male Star of Tomorrow" at their ShoWest convention, and the impression I'd get was he was trying to shrug off the pressure and mainstreaming such acclaim might bring. He answered the door only after a long wait (loud Aussie rock was emanating from within), stuck out a bright range hand, and proudly showed off the ancient dark-wood molding he was busy painting an eye-scorching optic-Tang color. This was the Ledger I spoke with that day:

The child of amateur theater buffs living in Perth, Ledger graduated from high school early, at age 16, and burned down the road to Sydney "to pursue my life," as he puts it. "I was in such a hurry to experience life--to feel pain, to have my heart broken, to create a soul. I wanted to understand myself, and the only way to do that was to put myself in the arena, in the middle of a pack of lions." He adds that his parents, engineer Kim Ledger and French tutor Sally Ann Bell, "have always been very big on letting me discover inside what I wanted to do." His acting apprenticeship had started in local theater under his mother's influence and included stints with Sydney's Globe Shakespeare Company and a number of Aussie TV roles. Through it all, Ledger says, "I never went to acting school, I never had a coach. I've always been that way; I never read instruction manuals to things--I like to just figure it out."

Though he did fine with my questions, one fairly tame query about his history momentarily tripped him up. "I dunno, man," he said, "I just smoked one before you got here, ya know?" A bit later, asked about reclusive Wes Bentley, his co-star in Four Feathers, he would offer:

""Wes Bentley loves to bathe in milk and cornflakes every morning before he goes on set," he discloses, working to keep a straight face. "Yeah, it's a beauty thing."

He seemed a terrifically robust 22-year-old. (A Knight's Tale director Brian Helgeland told me that of the 20 or so stuntmen who worked on the thudding action scenes of the film, "Heath was about the third best.")
If it was pills that killed him, perhaps the success that followed had undermined either his robust health or that joie de vivre. In 2001, I wouldn't have guessed it. As he told me then:

"I'm not good at future planning," Ledger says. "I really don't say, 'Now it's time for me to have an American accent, to do a cowboy or a cop movie.' It's just about directors and material I want to work with. I happen to love what I do, my profession, but also the opposite--to sit out here and not think about it. My job isn't to please people. It's instinctual. When I read the right script, I'll know it."

He casts a hand idly toward the urban sprawl of L.A., from the bank towers downtown to the showbiz lawyers' ghetto of Century City, and sums up the past two dizzying years with a grin: "I can't wait to sleep it off".

May he do so peacefully.

(New York authorities transport Heath Ledger's body form his Soho apartment; Photo by Getty Images)