Heath Ledger died at an age when many gifted actors first reach liftoff. At 28, he had achieved acclaim, popularity and riches. But he was just beginning to define himself as an actor and a star. In Todd Haines' I'm Not There (2007), he played a tortured big-screen idol, ill at ease with conventional accomplishment and fame, in the manner of Bob Dylan - or James Dean. When Ledger succumbed to an accidental overdose of prescription drugs in January, Dean provided an inevitable point of comparison.
They both died young (Dean was even younger, 24), and each had big movies in the can - Dean, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956), and Ledger, The Dark Knight, which opens nationwide on Friday.
Ledger's death struck fear and self-loathing into the hearts and minds of publicists for The Dark Knight. How could they publicize Ledger's vaunted acting feat in the new Batman film without looking like grave-robbers? Although posthumous performances have sometimes helped movies at the box office (Jean Harlow's biggest hit was Saratoga), Ledger in The Dark Knight plays Batman's arch-villain, the Joker, as a psychotic anarchist, getting off on destruction. Stories of the actor's demise theorized that Ledger's trip to the dark side of the Joker put him over the edge.
FOR THE RECORD - A column in Sunday's Arts & Life section misidentified one of Heath Ledger's credits. The Australian actor played a knight in A Knight's Tale.
THE SUN REGRETS THE ERROR
But in recent weeks, Warner Bros. has played the Joker as a calling card for Oscar - and their gambit has been working. Screening the movie in advance only to selected journalists who've proclaimed (like Entertainment Weekly) that Ledger went out in "a young actor's blaze of glory," the studio has positioned Ledger for an Academy Award nomination and erased any residue of ghoulishness. That decision may be right, in more ways than one.
Although journalists were quick to put Ledger in the pantheon of generation-defining actors, the evidence on screen shows that as he fulfilled his promise he might have developed as a character-actor star, like Robert Duvall or Gene Hackman, rather than a generation-defining personality, like Dean.
Right from the start of his career, Dean conjured an aura that transcended acting. Playing the American screen's ultimate misunderstood kids in his first two movies, Elia Kazan's East Of Eden (1955) and Nicholas Ray's Rebel, he embodied the mingling of angst and anger in America's first youth generation. "The moment Dean appeared on the screen, they went crazy," Kazan recalled. "... then I realized that even though the picture was set during World War I, Jimmy had caught something very precise about that very moment in the Eisenhower era. It was the way kids felt toward their father at that time."
