After playing roles in several Australian television and film productions during the s, he moved to the United States in to further develop his film career. Ledger died in January [ 6 ] [ 4 ] from an accidental overdose as a result of prescription drug abuse. Ledger was born on 4 April in Perth , Western Australia, to Sally Ramshaw, a French teacher, and Kim Ledger, a racing car driver and mining engineer whose family established and owned the Ledger Engineering Foundry.
After sitting for early graduation exams at age 16 to get his diploma, Ledger left school to pursue an acting career. Ledger and Mr. Gyllenhaal make this anguished love story physically palpable. 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. He seems to tear it from his insides. Ledger doesn't just know how Ennis moves, speaks and listens; he knows how he breathes.
To see him inhale the scent of a shirt hanging in Jack's closet is to take measure of the pain of love lost. After Brokeback Mountain , Ledger costarred with fellow Australian Abbie Cornish in the Australian film Candy , an adaptation of the novel Candy: A Novel of Love and Addiction , as young heroin addicts in love attempting to break free of their addiction, whose mentor is played by Geoffrey Rush ; for his performance as sometime poet Dan, Ledger was nominated for three "Best Actor" awards, including one of the Film Critics Circle of Australia Awards , which both Cornish and Rush won in their categories.
In his penultimate film role, Ledger played the Joker in Christopher Nolan 's film The Dark Knight , which was released nearly six months after his death. While working on the film in London, Ledger told Sarah Lyall in their New York Times interview that he viewed The Dark Knight ' s Joker as a " psychopathic , mass murdering , schizophrenic clown with zero empathy ".
Ledger had aspirations to become a film director and had made some music videos with his production company The Masses , which director Todd Haynes praised highly in his tribute to Ledger upon accepting the ISP Robert Altman Award , which Ledger posthumously shared, on 23 February At a news conference at the Venice Film Festival , Ledger spoke of his desire to make a documentary film about the British singer-songwriter Nick Drake , who died in , at the age of 26, from an overdose of an antidepressant.
