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Heath Ledger

(1979-2008)

Who Was Heath Ledger?

Heath Ledger's breakout role was in the film 10 Things I Hate About You with Julia Stiles. Ledger received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for his role in Brokeback Mountain. In 2008, after completing filming on Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, Ledger died as the result of an accidental prescription drug overdose. He received a posthumous Best Actor Academy Award for his performance as the Joker. Ledger had a daughter with actress Michelle Williams.

Early Life

Ledger was born in Perth, Australia, on April 4, 1979, to mother Sally Ledger Bell, a French teacher, and father Kim Ledger, a racecar driver and mining specialist. He and his sister, Kate, were reportedly named after two main characters in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. He also had two half-sisters: Ashleigh Bell and Olivia Ledger, both of whom were born into his parents' second marriages. But Ledger's closest family relationship was with Kate, whom he later credited for spurring his acting career.

Early in life, Ledger found a passion for pl

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Heath Ledger

Australian actor (1979–2008)

Heath Andrew Ledger (4 April 1979 – 22 January 2008) was an Australian actor. After playing roles in several Australian television and film productions during the 1990s, he moved to the United States in 1998 to further develop his film career. His work consisted of 20 films in a variety of genres, including 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), The Patriot (2000), A Knight's Tale (2001), Monster's Ball (2001), Casanova (2005), Lords of Dogtown (2005), Brokeback Mountain (2005), Candy (2006), I'm Not There (2007), The Dark Knight (2008), and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), the latter two of which were posthumously released.^[1] He also produced and directed music videos and aspired to be a film director.^[2]

For his portrayal of Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, he received nominations for the BAFTA Award,^[3]Screen Actors Guild Award, Golden Globe Award and the Academy Award for Best Actor, becoming the eighth-youngest nominee in the category at that time.^[

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Heath Ledger

Few Australian film actors have had swift journeys to international stardom – Errol Flynn in the 1930s, Rod Taylor in the 1950s, Mel Gibson in the ‘80s and Heath Ledger in the ‘90s and early 2000s are the ones that immediately spring to mind. Ledger’s rapid rise was due to a combination of his talent, determination, looks, voice and a resolve to embrace the diversity of that most durable of performers, the character actor. It would have been easy for Ledger to keep repeating himself in high school roles similar to his Hollywood debut, 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), but that was not the way he saw life.

Ledger was born on 4 April 1979 in Perth, Western Australia, the son of Kim Ledger, an engineer, and Sally Ledger (nee Ramshaw), a haematology technician, who named him after Heathcliff, the hero of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847). They had already named an older daughter Katherine (Kate, born in 1975) after the heroine of that novel, and it was Kate who encouraged Heath’s acting for theatre at the same time as he was excelling at school sports.

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