Heath Ledger

Heath Ledger arrived in Hollywood in 1999 with a one-way ticket from Perth and one fixed idea: never to repeat a role that would bring easy money. He was twenty years old. He had just released 10 Things I Hate About You, and the executives at the major studios put blank contracts on the table for him to star in identical teen comedies for five years.

Ledger said no to everything.

Durante casi un año rechazó ofertas que sumaban millones de dólares mientras subsistía a base de comida barata en un piso compartido de Los Ángeles. Prefería la incertidumbre financiera antes que alimentar un molde prefabricado. Mel Gibson lo rescató en el 2000 para encarnar a su hijo en The Patriot, un rodaje colosal donde el joven australiano aprendió a dominar el peso del silencio frente a la cámara.

Shortly after, A Knight's Tale arrived in 2001. Columbia Pictures plastered streets across half the world with giant posters of his face under the tagline “He will conquer you.” That blatant campaign triggered a visceral rejection in him, because he felt the studio was selling a poster rather than an actor.

The Price of Dismantling a Public Image

So he decided to blow up any commercial expectations. Between 2002 and 2003, he suffered a string of consecutive box office flops with The Four Feathers and Monster's Ball, two failed productions that scared off the most accommodating casting directors.

And then 2005 arrived.

That year he released four films. But it was Ang Lee who gave him the defining material in Brokeback Mountain. His portrayal of cowboy Ennis Del Mar was free of dramatic flourishes. Ledger built the character from a suffocating physical rigidity, clenching his teeth and swallowing his syllables to portray the cost of rural repression in Wyoming.

Specialist critics immediately praised that technical restraint. The performance earned him his first Oscar nomination at just 26 years old and dispelled any industry prejudice about his acting abilities.

Instead of cashing in on that recognition with comfortable studio projects, Ledger returned to Australia to film Candy in 2006, a harsh drama about heroin addiction directed by Neil Armfield. The budget barely reached five million dollars, and the actor cut his fee to spend time with real patients at detox centers in the weeks before filming.

London Lockdown and the Final Cut

When Christopher Nolan offered him the role of the Joker in The Dark Knight at the end of 2006, the script wasn't even finished. Ledger secluded himself alone for a month and a half in a London hotel. He created a visual diary full of comic book clippings, photographs of Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, and raw doodles.

He developed a raspy voice with unpredictable cadences inspired by recordings of Tom Waits. He also worked side by side with John Caglione Jr.'s makeup team to create that degraded look, applying layers of white paint to his own palms and rubbing them erratically before each take.

The shoot was grueling. Ledger suffered from severe insomnia and slept barely two hours a day between night shoots in Chicago and exhausting action sequences.

On January 22, 2008, he was found dead in his Manhattan residence. The official autopsy determined accidental intoxication from a combination of six prescription drugs, including painkillers and sedatives, ruling out any hypothesis of deliberate negligence.

El suceso paralizó el montaje de The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus de Terry Gilliam. Johnny Depp, Jude Law y Colin Farrell se sumaron al reparto para finalizar los tramos pendientes del personaje en planos de fantasía y donaron sus salarios íntegros a Matilda, la hija de Ledger.

In February 2009, the Academy posthumously awarded him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his work in The Dark Knight, a film that grossed 1,006 million dollars at the global box office.