Obituary: Heath Ledger

Jan 23, 2008, 8:57 GMT

Australian actor Heath Ledger on the red carpet during the 78th annual Academy Awards in Hollywood, California, 05 March 2006. New York police reports Heath Ledger was found dead 22 January 2008 at a downtown Manhattan apartment. The police said Ledger\'s death may be drug-related. Ledger was 28. EPA/DANNY MOLOSHOK

Sydney - Tributes from film industry people for Heath Ledger spoke mostly of the vibrant presence on screen that nearly won him an Oscar in 2006 for playing a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain.

The Australian heartthrob was found dead aged 28 in his New York apartment Tuesday of a possible drug overdose.

'Brokeback Mountain was such a strong role for him and it was such a good example of how well he was able to inhabit a role,' said local film critic Peter Krausz.

Again and again, the inordinately handsome high-school drop-out was praised by industry luminaries for acting abilities that seemed to compel the cameras to linger on the lanky lithe body, the wry smile, the alabaster skin, the tousled hair.

Neil Armfield, the Australian who directed Ledger alongside Oscar-winner Geoffrey Rush in the local drugs-and-sex film Candy, said he was 'just a master, so passionately concerned to get it right.'

Ultimate craftsman Rush mourned the loss of 'such a sensitive and committed and daring actor.'

Unlike Rush, who with Mel Gibson and Cate Blanchett learned their trade at Sydney's NIDA drama school, Ledger was a Russell Crowe - self-taught, instinctual and seemingly guileless on screen.

'I don't have a technique,' he once said. 'I've never been a believer in having one set technique on how to act. There're no rules and there's no rule book.'

Ledger was the obverse of the method actor: as Krausz observed, he inhabited a role rather than just borrowed it.

'Sometimes, most often than not, once we start shooting I won't look at the script at all until we finished shooting. It's kind of like it's been imprinted in my head during rehearsals. You just let it go,' he told a film magazine in 2001.

His first big role was akin to Brokeback Mountain: in the 1996 television series Sweat he played a gay athlete. His Hollywood breakthrough came through Gibson in 2000, who cast him in The Patriot. Currently, he's in cinemas playing one of the six Bob Dylans in the biopic I'm Not There.

Blanchett, who earned an Oscar nomination for playing another of the Dylans, was a big fan. 'I deeply respect Heath's work and always admired his continuing development as an artist,' she said.

Film industry people tended to skirt round Ledger's personal qualities and gloss over the turbulence in a life lived at speed.

But local film critic Margaret Pomeranz touched on his shyness, his awkwardness with fame, his anger at the press.

'I don't think he was ever very comfortable with that press profile that is so necessary with young performers,' Pomeranz said.

It was as though success had come so soon, so easily, that it had blighted the learning process that is adolescence.

'People may seem to have everything on the outside, but really they are craving some sort of peace inside, and they go about finding it the wrong way,' she said.

Fellow actors Naomi Watts and Michelle Williams were his most serious female companions. Williams, a co-star in Brokeback Mountain, bore his child, 2-year-old Matilda. They broke up last year. He said it was a heart-rending moment.

Unlike his professional colleagues, his family have been effusive in their praise of his personal qualities.

'Heath has touched so many people on so many different levels during his short life that few had the pleasure of truly knowing him,' his father said. 'He was a down-to-earth, generous, kind-hearted, life-loving, unselfish individual who was extremely inspirational to many.'

The past two months had seen Ledger spend lots of time with his family in Perth, the isolated city on Australia's west coast he left when he was 17 to make a name for himself in Sydney. He was back with his family and pretty much the lad he would have been if fame and fortune had not got in the way.

During that spell in his hometown he told a journalist that 'it's really enabled me to be a boy again from home, and feel like I'd never left.'