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Heath Andrew Ledger (4 April 1979 – 22 January 2008) was an Australian actor. After playing roles in several Australian television and film productions during the 1990s, he moved to the United States in 1998 to further develop his film career. His work consisted of 20 films in a variety of genres, including 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), The Patriot (2000), A Knight's Tale (2001), Monster's Ball (2001), Casanova (2005), 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 of which were posthumously released. 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, Robbie Clark, one of six characters embodying aspects of Bob Dylan's life and persona in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There. Ledger died in January 2008 from an accidental overdose as a result of prescription drug abuse. A few months before his death, he finished filming his role as the Joker in The Dark Knight; the performance brought him praise and popularity, and 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. Early life and education 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 Frank Ledger. 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. Acting career 1990s After sitting for early graduation exams at age 16 to get his diploma, Ledger left school to pursue an acting career. With Trevor DiCarlo, his best friend since the age of three, Ledger drove across Australia from Perth to Sydney, returning to Perth to take a small role in Clowning Around (1992), the first part of a two-part television series, and to work on the TV series Sweat (1996), in which he played a cyclist. From 1993 to 1997, Ledger also had parts in the Perth television series Ship to Shore (1993); Ledger also had parts in the short-lived Fox Broadcasting Company fantasy-drama Roar (1997); in Home and Away (1997), one of Australia's most successful television shows; and in the Australian film Blackrock (1997), his feature film debut. In 1999, he starred in the teen comedy 10 Things I Hate About You and in the acclaimed Australian crime film Two Hands, directed by Gregor Jordan. 2000s In the early 2000s, he starred in supporting roles as Gabriel Martin, the eldest son of Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson), in The Patriot (2000), and as Sonny Grotowski, the son of Hank Grotowski (Billy Bob Thornton), in Monster's Ball (2001); as well as leading or title roles in A Knight's Tale (2001), The Four Feathers (2002), The Order (2003), Ned Kelly (2003), Casanova (2005), The Brothers Grimm (2005), and Lords of Dogtown (2005). In 2001, he won a ShoWest Award as "Male Star of Tomorrow". Ledger received "Best Actor of 2005" awards from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the San Francisco Film Critics Circle for his performance in Brokeback Mountain, in which he plays Wyoming ranch hand Ennis Del Mar, who has a love affair with aspiring rodeo rider Jack Twist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. He also received the nominations for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor — Motion Picture Drama, a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role, a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, and an Academy Award for Best Actor for this performance, making him, at age 26, the eighth-youngest nominee in the category. In The New York Times review of the film, critic Stephen Holden writes: "Both Mr. Ledger and Mr. Gyllenhaal make this anguished love story physically palpable. Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn." In a review in Rolling Stone, Peter Travers states: "Ledger's magnificent performance is an acting miracle. He seems to tear it from his insides. Ledger doesn't just know how Ennis moves, speaks and listens; he knows how he breathes. To see him inhale the scent of a shirt hanging in Jack's closet is to take measure of the pain of love lost." After Brokeback Mountain, Ledger costarred with fellow Australian Abbie Cornish in the 2006 Australian film Candy, an adaptation of the 1998 novel Candy: A Novel of Love and Addiction, as young heroin addicts in love attempting to break free of their addiction, whose mentor is played by Geoffrey Rush; for his performance as sometime poet Dan, Ledger was nominated for three "Best Actor" awards, including one of the Film Critics Circle of Australia Awards, which both Cornish and Rush won in their categories. Shortly after the release of Candy, Ledger was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. As one of six actors embodying different aspects of the life of Bob Dylan in the 2007 film I'm Not There, directed by Todd Haynes, Ledger "won praise for his portrayal of 'Robbie [Clark],' a moody, counter-culture actor who represents the romanticist side of Dylan, but says accolades are never his motivation". Posthumously, on 23 February 2008, he shared the 2007 Independent Spirit Robert Altman Award with the rest of the film's ensemble cast, its director, and its casting director. In his penultimate film role, Ledger played the Joker in Christopher Nolan's 2008 film The Dark Knight, which was released nearly six months after his death. While working on the film in London, Ledger told Sarah Lyall in their New York Times interview that he viewed The Dark Knight's Joker as a "psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy". For his performance in The Dar.... Discover the Nicole Weisensee Egan popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Nicole Weisensee Egan books.