Ledger never developed that kind of resonant big-star persona, not even in his one certified Zeitgeist movie, the gay cowboy romance, Brokeback Mountain (2005). He was nominated for best actor, Jake Gyllenhaal for best supporting actor. But it was Gyllenhaal who carried the movie. If the picture clicked for millions of moviegoers, it was probably because Gyllenhaal allowed them to see Ledger's stiff, emotionally strangled Ennis del Mar through the eyes of the besotted Jack Twist. Whether you consider it a camp classic or a wrenching cry from the heart, Twist's anguished "I wish I knew how to quit you" became the film's signature line.
Still, Ledger was earnest, talented and game, committed to acting for the long haul. With the success of Ten Things I Hate About You (1999), he could have pursued celebrity as a heartthrob. Instead he opted for difficult, diverse roles, including a jail guard who refuses to become a third-generation racist in Marc Forster's Monster's Ball. When he let you see him sweat in that movie, he also showed you blood and tears. And his tension as an actor sometimes blended, in a good way, with his character's.
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
His splashy adventures were at least offbeat, such as Brian Helgeland's arena-rock-flavored knight-in-shining-armor film, First Knight (2001), and Shekhar Kapur's remake of The Four Feathers (2002), a tale of courage and cowardice during the British Army's crusade against the Islamic fanatic known as the Mahdi in the mid-1880s.
Directors liked Ledger, and were loyal to him: he played Jacob Grimm in Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm, and was in the middle of another Gilliam picture, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, when he died.
He lacked the gravity and dash that could have anchored and energized sprawling fantasies like First Knight. He might have grown into those qualities. But I generally preferred him in juicy supporting roles, such as the mentor-entrepreneur in Lord of Dogtown (2002), who practices tough love on his skateboarding team yet keeps faith with his own personal counterculture. Ledger has more genuine pathos than any of the kids in this movie; he plays an arrested adolescent with a grungy dignity that underlies even his drunken bouts of self-pity. He lets this character grow on you. And it's this sneak-attack quality that could have made Ledger a director's best friend for decades to come.
