The tributes came quickly and from the heart. ''I had such great hope for him. He was just taking off and to lose his life at such a young age is a tragic loss,'' Mel Gibson, who costarred with Ledger in The Patriot, said in a statement. ''This is an unimaginable tragedy,'' echoed director Todd Haynes, who cast Ledger as one of many Bob Dylans in last year's idiosyncratic biopic I'm Not There. ''Heath was a true artist, a deeply sensitive man, an explorer, gifted and wise beyond his years.'' At press time, there was no comment from actress Michelle Williams, who met Ledger on the set of Brokeback Mountain, gave birth to the couple's 2-year-old daughter, Matilda, and shared a Brooklyn brownstone with the actor until they split up last September. Ledger's family, however, released a statement confirming his ''very tragic, untimely and accidental passing.... Heath has touched so many people on so many different levels during his short life but few had the pleasure of truly knowing him.''
All this made for an unlikely end for a star deliberately removed from the Hollywood maelstrom that seemed to consume the likes of River Phoenix and, more recently, Brad Renfro. At once baby-faced and grizzled, with a low, gravelly voice and a smile that could be alternately impish and melancholy, Ledger moved easily between roles and genres and wove an unpredictable course through Hollywood, constantly pivoting from romantic comedies (10 Things I Hate About You, Casanova) to period epics (The Patriot, The Four Feathers), and from action films (A Knight's Tale) to dramas (Monster's Ball, I'm Not There). His biggest fear, it seemed, was to be pinned down. ''I have no plan of attack,'' he told EW in 2006. ''I like for it to fall from the sky and land in my lap.''
That unconventional streak made Ledger irresistible to many of Hollywood's most adventurous filmmakers, including Brokeback director Lee, The Brothers Grimm's Terry Gilliam (with whom he was midway through shooting what would be his final project, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus), and Christopher Nolan, who completed principal photography on The Dark Knight last summer. ''I met with Heath a couple of times over the years, but nothing really panned out until The Dark Knight,'' Nolan told EW on the Chicago set last year. ''The first time I met him, I remember him explaining to me that he wanted to take his time as a young actor. He didn't want to be thrust center stage before he achieved what he wanted to achieve. To be perfectly honest, that's a line I've heard from a lot of young actors. But he's the only one that I then paid 10 dollars to go see do something really extraordinary — which was Brokeback Mountain. That was an incredible performance — such lack of vanity, such immersion. As an actor, Heath is fearless.''
NEXT PAGE: Ledger's humble beginnings
