The one role Heath Ledger always wanted to play: “I pursued it for a while”
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(Credits: Alamy)
If you find you’ve got a spare couple of hours over the holiday, two and a half of them to be more precise, I can highly recommend going back and revisiting a movie currently ranked as the fourth greatest action movie of all time on IMDb, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, and revel in one of the finest cinema villains in history thanks to Heath Ledger.
If, like me, it’s a film that you haven’t seen in quite some time, then you will have a new appreciation for just how spectacular the movie is and just how menacing and unlike other bad guys Ledger’s Joker is. It is nuanced, unhinged, and maniacal, but at its core, there’s a bleakness that makes it all the more affecting. No wonder Ledger got completely immersed in the character, sometimes unable to separate the real world and the film.
Although Ledger was making waves in Hollywood for a while before Nolan cast him, it was The Dark Knight that signposted what a talent he was and would be. Sadly, of course, it was acclaim that came posthumously after he was found dead at just 28, with an Oscar and Golden Globe award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’.
Nolan had to edit the film in the immediate aftermath of Ledger’s death, and he kept the scenes in the order the Australian filmed them in a process he found incredibly difficult; Nolan struggled to keep it together even some time afterwards as he collected Ledger’s awards for him the following year.
The year before he passed away, Ledger revealed he had found a kinship with another astonishingly talented and tragic young artist, the British folk musician Nick Drake. Entirely unappreciated when he was releasing magical and influential music in the late 1960s, Drake was notoriously shy, barely able to speak when performing live, but produced three albums of timeless music, Pink Moon, Bryter Layter and Five Years Left that were lush in orchestration, melodically diverse and used guitar tunings nobody else had even thought of.
Like Ledger, Drake was found dead at an early age, due to an overdose of antidepressants at just 26. It took many years for his music to be understood as some of the most important and inspirational to be released, and even now, people are just beginning to discover him.
Ledger was busy promoting the Bob Dylan movie I’m Not There in 2007 when he said: “I was obsessed with an artist by the name of Nick Drake. I was obsessed with his story and his music, and I pursued it for a while, and [I] still have hopes to kind of tell his story one day. But it kind of died away, faded away, because I… He was a very mysterious figure, and I felt like I would be taking too many liberties.”
Of course, Ledger never got the opportunity to play Drake, and neither has anyone else, for that matter. Although there is an acclaimed documentary about the musician’s life from 2002 called A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake, a biopic has never been attempted, likely because his life story wasn’t overly dramatic, he simply played and recorded music that should have been heard by more people, and passed away far too early in 1974 before he knew what would happen in years to come.
Ledger, in order to show his appreciation, made a short black and white video to be shown at an exhibition celebrating the life of Drake, which the singer’s estate described as “extremely moving”.
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