Heath Andrew Ledger (4 April 1979 – 22 January 2008) was an Australian actor and music video director. After playing roles in several Australian television and film productions during the 1990s, Ledger moved to the United States in 1998 to develop his film career further. His work consisted of twenty films, including 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), The Patriot (2000), A Knight's Tale (2001), Monster's Ball (2001), 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 being posthumous releases. He also produced and directed music videos and aspired to be a film director.
For his portrayal of Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain he received nominations for the BAFTA Award, 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. In 2007 he played a fictional actor named Robbie Clark, one of six characters embodying aspects of Bob Dylan's life and persona in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There. He received the Independent Spirit Robert Altman Award with the rest of the ensemble cast for the film.
Ledger died in January 2008 as a result of an accidental overdose of medications. A few months before his death, Ledger had finished filming his role as the Joker in The Dark Knight, with his performance earning him universal acclaim and popularity, receiving numerous posthumous awards including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor, and the BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor. His final role in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was released posthumously in 2009.
Early life and education
Heath Andrew Ledger was born on 4 April 1979, 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. The Sir Frank Ledger Charitable Trust is named after his great-grandfather. He had English, Irish, and Scottish ancestry. Ledger attended Mary's Mount Primary School in Gooseberry Hill, and later Guildford Grammar School, where he had his first acting experiences, starring in a school production as Peter Pan at age ten. His parents separated when he was ten and divorced when he was eleven. Ledger's older sister Kate, an actress and later a publicist, to whom he was very close, inspired his acting on stage, and his love of Gene Kelly inspired his successful choreography, leading to Guildford Grammar's 60-member team's "first all-boy victory" at the Rock Eisteddfod Challenge. Ledger's two half-sisters are Ashleigh Bell (b. 1990), his mother's daughter with her second husband Roger Bell, and Olivia Ledger (b. 1996), his father's daughter with his second wife Emma Brown.
