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Magazine
TRIBUTE
Hollywood’s dark knight
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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Heath Ledger, who died recently, was fascinated by the gothic and the darkly romantic.
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He would accept a big, attention-getting part only if it meant playing something like the psychopathic Joker in the new Batman film.
Trying to learn a little more about Heath Ledger than I already knew, I discovered a little known, but revealing, detail about the last months of his life that fascinated me. Heath had been obsessed with reclusive British singer-songwriter Nick Drake who died at 26 at the peak of his career from drug overdose.
A few months before his eerily similar death, Heath had made a music video of Drake’s “Black Eyed Dog”, which was the last song Drake had recorded before overdosing on anti-depression medication in 1974. The last frame of the video shows Heath drowning in a bathtub. Ledger often spoke of Drake as “a very mysterious figure”, a hero he desperately wanted to make a film about. It’s clear that this intensely gifted Australian actor constantly found himself seduced by the dark.
Anarchic presence
Ledger was, as Hollywood stars go, strange. He was uncomfortable with his pretty face and distrusted fame. He was also fatally drawn to all that is dark and mysterious in the world. Being a star in two Hollywood movies, “Ten Things I Hate About You” and “A Knight’s Tale”, was already too much of the mainstream and the popular for him. Since then he has sabotaged studio projects and had even once said: “I wanted to take the blond out of my career”. As his reputation for being an anarchic presence grew in Hollywood, his reputation as a fearless and honest actor intensified.
He rejected stellar roles like Spiderman and accepted difficult parts like the self-destructive poet and heroine junkie in “Candy”. He would accept a big, attention-getting part only if it meant playing something like the psychopathic Joker in the new Batman film. When “The Dark Knight”, the eagerly awaited sequel to “Batman Begins” opens worldwide in theatres later this year, I’m betting that all eyes (and hearts) are going to be on Heath Ledger, not Batman. His sudden, tragic, and mysterious death makes him the true dark knight of Hollywood.
A fascination for the gothic and the darkly romantic may have begun with his own parent’s obsession with Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights”. Heath and his sister were named after Heathcliff and Catherine. On his way to becoming a Hollywood star, the actor seems to have morphed into a real-life brooding, bad boy Bronte character.
Tragic characters
To dirty his pretty-boy poster looks and prove his depth as an actor he risked playing gothic, tragic characters. His finely boned face seemed sculpted for those handsome period films (“The Patriot”, “The Four Feathers”; he was also Oliver Stone’s original choice to play Alexander) and his pin-up blond ringlets for romantic comedies, but he was more drawn to playing outsiders like the quietly suffering gay cowboy in “Brokeback Mountian” or his unerring incarnation of Bob Dylan fleeing from fame in “I’m Not There”.
A few months before his death, the star had just completed his scenes for “The Dark Knight” (the first non-American actor to play the Joker) but had only begun work on Terry Gilliam’s “The Imagination of Doctor Parnassus”, a $30 million adventure-fantasy film. Ledger had also been planning his first movie as director, an adaptation of “The Queen’s Gambit”, an unusual thriller set in the intense, brooding world of chess tournaments.
A filmmaker’s tribute
Shekhar Kapur, who directed Heath in “The Four Feathers”, had spoken to the star the night before he died. “I had just arrived in New York last night,” writes the filmmaker on his website, “he said he could not see me that night but really wanted to meet me the next day. He made me promise that I would call him in the morning and wake him up. I tried. Little did I know that his soul had already left his body. He was one of the most gentle, the most honest, the most caring, and most compassionate persons I had met.”
Inevitably, Heath Ledger is going to be compared with River Phoenix, the promising actor who created an entire legend around him when he died at 23 of substance abuse. Phoenix, bless him, had been a fierce animal rights activist who had become a vegan at age 7. He protested the slaughter of animals for food, sport and fashion, and boycotted animal products on film sets.
Ledger was trying to create a context outside the trappings of Hollywood narcissism and fame, a context where he could live authentically and fearlessly even as he worked hard as an actor to break new barriers with challenging, complex roles. Heath wasn’t an activist or anything but it seems to me that he was searching for a way to engage his anarchic Heathcliffian soul with the world.
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