Young, gifted and dead.
Oscar nominee Heath Ledger, 28, was yesterday found dead, naked at the foot of his bed in his Manhattan flat.
A drug overdose is suspected.
Heath Ledger...too easy to brand him a pretty boy.
It’s probably fair to warn you right now the actor who first came to the general public’s attention when he played Mel Gibson's son in The Patriot (2000) is going to the centre of endless conspiracy theories and is sure to become the James Dean of the early 21st Century.
Get ready for scores of re-runs of the films which made the gay icon popular with both sexes
The 28-year-old Perth, Australia, born,actor and Brokeback Mountain star was found dead and a large amount of pills were found in the New York home.
Ledger, who was nominated for the best actor Oscar in 2006 for Brokeback Mountain, had a two-year-old daughter, Matilda, from his relationship with actress Michelle Williams, who played his wife in the film. The couple split up last year. He was said to be deeply depressed by Williams' decision to leave and only lived in New York to stay in contact with his daughter. So a beautiful, and I mean that in the way a straight man can mean of another male, man and dispirited preciously rare talent alone in what, in my experience, for a single can be the most desperate and loneliest city in the world - New York?
Heath Ledger, right, with Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain.
The actor was striking ever since he crashed into the Hollywood scene with tragic highlight as Gibson's eldest son in The Patriot.
The roles he took were pleasing, popular, and showed not a little courage for a new kid on the block.
Of course he is now to be forever primarily remembered as the gay cowboy Ennis, in Brokeback Mountain The untimely death ring-fences that, as well as the conspiracy theorem and icon status.
Fans of both sexes found him attractive. He had just finished playing the Joker in a new version of Batman - The Dark Knight. The producers are unlikely to pull that so there will be at least one other page in the volume of his work.
I remember him best from the quirky family entertainment film A Knight's Tale and as Billy Bob Thorton’s suicidal son in Monster's Ball.
He had played many well rounded roles Ned Kelly and Harry Faversham in The Four Feathers. Plus Casanova and Bob Dylan (very briefly) in I'm Not There
..and why do I bother to mention him at all here?
Because life has a way of developing into a series of bitter twists. I can tell you I remember him from exactly twenty years ago as a visitor, a boy with lots of other children, as he stood on the deck of a Tall Ship moored in Challenge Harbour, Fremantle (at the mouth of the Swan River downstream from Perth) about to take part in the Australian Bi-Centennial Tall Ships Race and proudly told it’s captain they shared they same birthday April 4th. A West Australian mate, who knew the Ledger family's engineering business, occasionally kept me up to date with the lad's development and career. Perth is the remotest city in the world and its citizens were proud of Ledger and his success.
I am cursed with a good memory and sometimes total recall...and, just sometimes, a great, over-whelming, world-weary sadness...and, as I age, such pointless loss, either by accident or design, does flatten the spirit more than a smidgeon.