Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Heath Ledger Dead at 28

I was sitting here writing a different entry when I happened to check my mail at Yahoo and discovered actor Heath Ledger had died. He was 28.

I had just been watching A Knight's Tale over the weekend, and I kept thinking he had so much more ahead of him in his career. After all, he was playing the Joker in The Dark Knight, and he did seem to choose some interesting projects and had worked with some really good directors, from Nolan and Ang Lee to Lasse Hallstrom and Terry Gilliam.

And I remember the first movie I saw him in, this little piece of Australian action noir called Two Hands, which he faced off against a crime boss played by Bryan Brown. And I saw him develop as an actor over the years, and I had hoped that he was going to become one of the great actors of his generation, especially after the last new movie I saw him in Candy, in which he played ironically enough, a heroin-addicted poet alongside Abbie Cornish, as the police are saying that drugs seem to have play a part in his death.

I know that with his death, The Dark Knight is going to become one of those iconic movies, like The Crow was for the posthumous Brandon Lee. There are some people whose deaths shock you, and this is one of those for me.



I'm not good at future planning. I don't plan at all. I don't know what I'm doing tomorrow. I don't have a day planner and I don't have a diary. I completely live in the now, not in the past, not in the future.

Sad days indeed.

6 comments:

D. Prince said...

I just heard as well and it's beyond sad.

AG said...

I'm aghast -- never saw this one coming. Clearly there were some awful problems that trumped all the good things going for him. Though honestly, I'm unnerved by the masseuse appointment; you wonder if maybe he figured someone would be along to reel him back in? Or one hears he was having work-related sleep issues; it's amazingly easy, when you're head's elsewhere and you're insanely tired, to forget you already took your meds. I can't even tell you how many times the One-A-Day inadvertently became the One-And-One-More-A-Day... God help us, sad whatever may have happened.

(And I am ashamed beyond words that one of the sites with which I am associated is choosing to let every mouth-breathing Fred Phelps wannabe in America post hateful, hateful things about this sad affair. Just saying.

MC said...

D.Prince: And as more information comes out, it keep getting more and more tragic.

AG: With news that he may have also had pneumonia, a set of tragic circumstances may have come together to rob us all of a great talent. And I can imagine the types of comments and knowing that in some instances, well, I can't help but get both angry and sucked into things, well, I think it would be better for me to avoid that particular article.

Mayren said...

This is a serious blow for the Celeb. & Pop Culture fans everywhere. I mean he was so young and so well known and talented.
Truly a big hit today.

The Ferryman said...

He's one of the last actors I would have expected this to happen to...

MC said...

Mayren: It feels very strange today to me, because it is like the reality of this event is truly hitting me.

Mr. Fab: Agreed. There really didn't seem to be any signals publicly that this could happen with him.