Heath Ledger, 1979 - 2008.

The actor Heath Ledger was found dead this afternoon in an apartment building at 421 Broome Street in SoHo, according to the New York City police. Mr Ledger was 28....

Mr Ledger, a native of Perth, Australia, won acclaim for his role as a co-star in Brokeback Mountain, a 2005 film.... Reviewing the film in the New York Times, the critic Stephen Holden wrote, "Mr Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn."

Mr Ledger met the actress Michelle Williams while filming Brokeback Mountain. The two actors fell into a very public romance. They had a daughter, Matilda Rose, who was born on Oct 28, 2005. They moved to Brooklyn, but then separated last year.

Sewell Chan, New York Times.

Updated through 1/24.

Updates, 1/23: "He was what we call in Australia a bloke, a guy who could rough it and wasn't given much to talking," writes Belinda Luscombe, who interviewed Ledger for Time in 2005. "Ledger was very serious about his work, trying to forge a path like that of Sean Penn or Jack Nicholson, trying to walk the line between what the studios wanted him to be (a romantic hero such as those he played in 10 Things I Hate About You and A Knight's Tale, his first two big hits) and the more renegade figures he was drawn to (Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain, the iconic Australia outlaw in Ned Kelly or the junkie in Candy)."

For indieWIRE, Peter Knegt reports on how the news hit Park City; and quotes a few statements, including one from Todd Haynes, who directed Ledger in I'm Not There: "This is an unimaginable tragedy. Heath was a true artist, a deeply sensitive man, an explorer, gifted and wise beyond his years. There is no finer person on this earth."

Cinematical contributors offer their thoughts.

"For every one person that ever gave two shits about Ledger as a friend, peer, or admirer of his work on-screen, there's a hundred that just need their tragicomic celebrity scoops, and another thousand that, truth be told, just want the tragedy," writes Ted Z.

"In eight years doing the job, I've never had to write about something as purely and genuinely miserable as this," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "Without going into Diana-style rhetoric, I can hardly think of a newsflash which would really shock me more. Heath Ledger - the name is short for 'Heathcliff' - is an actor who had grown in stature, in sensitivity, in feeling and in creative intelligence. We had all watched him transform himself from the likeable young dude who played the bad boy teen in 10 Things I Hate About You to the tragic cowboy Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee's magnificent Brokeback Mountain, who movingly discovers that the love of his life is a man. His stunningly persuasive transformation from young hunk to lonely old man in that film really was remarkable. His director, Ang Lee, called him a young Brando."

"He had just begun work on the Terry Gilliam fantasy The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, leaving the state of that project (and its seemingly cursed director) in temporary limbo," notes Bill Gibron at PopMatters. As for The Dark Knight, "Now, its name is nuclear."

"It is hard to know exactly when Mr Ledger discovered his range, and set about trying to explore it, but it is clear that he covered a lot of ground in a very short time," writes AO Scott in the NYT: "He had a taste for portraying troubled, brooding, self-destructive young men, it's true... but the temptation to blend their fates with Mr Ledger's own should be resisted at all costs. Those roles should be seen less as expressions of some imagined inner torment than as evidence of resourcefulness, creative restlessness and wit.... Mr Ledger's work will outlast the frenzy. But there should have been more. Instead of being preserved as a young star eclipsed in his prime, he should have had time to outgrow his early promise and become the strange, surprising, era-defining actor he always had the potential to be."

"Heath Ledger's death is particularly poignant to me because he is, like yours truly, 28 years old," writes Reihan Salam in the American Scene. "My generation will, I suspect, be the last human generation in either a very good way (we will transcend our limitations, we will live incredibly long lives, we will expand our moral imaginations, and in the process we will become something better than human) or in a very bad way (we will all be killed by nanite goo). So I hate the thought of any one of us biting the dust and missing the adventure to come, though of course that is as it must be."

Via Andrew Sullivan, who points to another appreciation by Rex Wockner and adds, "Gay men responded to Ledger and not just because he was surpassingly handsome. He really inhabited a dark place many of us escaped from, and he evoked it with enormous restraint and integrity. The darkness clearly haunted him, but he turned it into a thing of beauty and redemption. For a while."

"Focus Features CEO James Schamus, who worked with Ledger on Brokeback Mountain, today remembered him thusly: 'Heath Ledger was a courageous actor, and a great soul. He gave us the gift of sharing his fearless and beautiful love - of his craft, and of all who worked with him - for which all of us will be eternally grateful.'" FilmInFocus sets up a page where people can post their memories and/or thoughts.

Updates, 1/24: "Ledger's death illustrates the unusually intimate relationship the public has with movie stars," writes Joe Queenan in the Guardian. "This generation-spanning affection for actors can also be explained by the fact that no matter how reclusive and mysterious the star may be, the public feels that it knows him or her."

"It's difficult for me to write anything about Heath Ledger, still, without reflecting on the awfulness of the old-and-new media circus surrounding his death, and I suppose that while spitting out a little bit of my anger could be useful (at least to me and those of similar inclination), harping on it would have me ending up as self-righteous as anybody on the never-heard-of-him/who-cares-about-self-destructive-celebrities side of the fence," writes Glenn Kenny. "And as exercises in futility go, counseling the world that it ought to keep its yap shut until all the facts are in is a noble one, but it's an exercise in futility nonetheless."

"It will be depressing to see the inevitable cult of martyrdom and glam fatalism that's formed around male stars from James Dean to River Phoenix build a fresh shrine around Heath Ledger," writes Dennis Harvey at SF360. "But not half so depressing as the simple fact that we had so much yet to anticipate from him."

Nathaniel R: "It comes to this: I didn't realize that I was as attached to Heath Ledger as I was. But I understood this morning that it all goes back to Brokeback Mountain. Something about that movie settled deep inside me. I feel protective towards all involved. It must be part of the reason that I keep writing about Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal. It's why I feel all warm inside when I see Ang Lee smile. It's why I perked up so much when Michelle Williams wafted into frame in I'm Not There looking and feeling nothing like Alma Del Mar. It's why."

Posted by dwhudson at January 22, 2008 2:19 PM