Celluloid Confetti

The morning after the Oscar nominations were announced, I caught a glimpse of the first edition of one of the papers on the train into work. “A bad night for Keira Knightley” ran the headline.

Well, it turns out that Heath Ledger’s night was much, much worse.

Of all the young actors in the world, Ledger had so much going for him - he was making bold career choices and delivering flawless performances.

The world, it seemed, was his oyster, and the only question that remained in my mind was whether or not his bookcase would be wide enough to hold all the Oscars that were certain to come his way.

Following Ledger’s death, aged only 28, there has arisen a cacophony of speculation and muck-raking, much of which reads like a bad film script, casting Ledger in a part that, in his career, he would never have chosen to play.

Talk of rolled up $20 dollar bills, heroin addiction and stints in rehab came and went, but to the disappointment of redtops everywhere, nothing illegal has turned up; the cause of death remains inconclusive [edit: the cause of death has been confirmed as a cocktail of prescription (ie, entirely legal) medication].

The New York Times’ Sarah Lyall claimed to have conducted Ledger’s last interview, in which the actor complained of insomnia. She speculated his death might have been an accidental overdose of sleeping pills caused by a desperate attempt to get some shuteye.

But that interview was all the way back in November, so who knows.

Fox News’ John Gibson opened his radio show with funeral music, played the “I wish I knew how to quit you” quote from Brokeback Mountain and quipped, “Well, he found out how to quit you!”.

According to Gibson, Ledger was a “weirdo” with a “serious drug problem”.

Jack Nicholson, the actor who last donned the Joker’s lipstick, had one comment for the waiting press: “I warned him”. Warned him about what, exactly? It’s hard to picture Jack Nicholson as the voice of moderation.

But if Ledger was really such a hellraiser, how come the world missed it for so long? Do we need new paparazzi? The last time Ledger registered as a blip on the gossip columns was when he split from his fiancée Michelle Williams last September after a three-year relationship.

Since then, nothing.

That’s why these belated attempts to paint Ledger as just another Britney Spears or Amy Winehouse simply won’t wash. In his life, he made headlines for one reason: his performances - and these were truly newsworthy.

After graduating from Home and Away, the hunky young Australian made his Hollywood debut in 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), an adaption of The Taming of the Shrew, before slipping into solid action roles in The Patriot (2000) (in which he played Mel Gibson’s son), and as the lead in the medieval swords n’ sackcloth epic A Knight’s Tale (2001).

But it was Ledger’s cameo as Billy Bob Thornton’s tragic son in Monster’s Ball (2001) that landed him the role of Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005).

Annie Proulx, who wrote the story on which Brokeback Mountain was based, marvelled at Ledgers uncanny ability to get inside her head (I believe the septuagenarian author actually described the experience a “mindfuck”, but the original source of the quote eludes me).

After his Oscar-nominated performance in Brokeback, Ledger was a surprise choice to play the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s Batman sequel, The Dark Knight.

Talk that the role might have pushed him over the edge is surely misplaced: filming finished months ago, and Ledger had already started work on Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

The status of that film remains unclear - will Ledger’s scenes be reshot with another actor? Will the film be re-written to allow different actors to play the same role? Or will Doctor Parnassus join Don Quixote as another doomed Gilliam project?

Either way, Ledger will be missed. Think of all the great performances he had yet to deliver. I think it’ll be some time before we learn how to quit him.