R.I.P. Heath Ledger
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The Mk connection gets stranger...her security confirmed to police they were dating!
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/200...e_told_mary_kate_olsen_about_find.html?page=0
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/200...e_told_mary_kate_olsen_about_find.html?page=0
XxpinktinksxX
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OMG 
electricladyland
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Just in case anyone's interested in the legacy of his art (yes his art in "Hollywood"), rather than the circumstances surrounding his death.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-heath24jan24,0,3822000.story?track=ntothtml
From the Los Angeles Times
AN APPRECIATION
Heath Ledger, vulnerable male
The actor redefined what it means to be masculine
By Reed Johnson
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 24, 2008
THIS sadly underachieving decade, which the British tellingly call the "noughts," has been a troubled one for the concept of masculinity. That's been as true of Hollywood movies as it has of the increasingly nebulous entity we call the real world.
As much as any serious actor of his generation, Heath Ledger, the 28-year-old Australian who was found dead Tuesday in a Manhattan apartment, grappled on screen with the shifting, clashing ideals of what masculinity might mean at the start of the 21st century. Whether playing a heroin-addled poet, a goofy but earnest medieval knight who beats time to '70s rock tunes, a British officer determined to recoup his lost honor, a womanizing Venetian libertine or a sheep-herding cowboy who falls tragically in love with his bunkmate, Ledger wrestled, painfully and often very movingly, with trying to reconcile manhood's competing claims of duty, honor, love, sexuality, work and loyalty (to a woman, a man, a country, an ideal).
In contrast to certain of his lighter-weight contemporaries in their 20s and early 30s, Ledger didn't simply make "guy films." He seemed to steer away from the frat-house jocularity and beery "I-love-you-man!" sentimentality that so many young male performers fall back on in order to reassure their fans, their publicists and perhaps themselves that, underneath whatever sensitive, emotionally layered character they may be portraying, they still haven't lost that ol' macho swagger. Tough guys don't dance, the recently departed pugilist-novelist Norman Mailer once wrote. Neither do they tear up on screen very often, at least not if they still want to be seen as tough guys.
Ledger had a basso profundo ruggedness about him, a premature cragginess that already had begun to nip away at his youthful beauty. But he wasn't afraid to show a deeper vulnerability beneath the scrappy Aussie exterior, a self-doubt that apparently mirrored the actor's own soul. "I like to do something I fear," he told The Times in a 2005 interview. ". . . I like to be afraid of the project. I always am. . . . There's a huge amount of anxiety that drowns out any excitement I have toward the project."
It was largely that roiling anxiety and vulnerability -- and the courage to show it to the world -- that set Ledger apart from the plastic action-hero and pretty-boy Hollywood masses, and that made him especially appealing to female audiences. (If you doubt this, check out the copious digital eulogies now flooding the Internet.)
Like his namesake, Heathcliff, the brooding hero of Emily Brontë's archetypal Gothic novel "Wuthering Heights," Ledger gave vent to obsessive, over-the-top emotional states that Western popular culture, since at least the Romantic period, has more commonly assigned to women. His brave, emotionally (and often literally) naked performances, typically shorn of any protective irony, exposed him to risks that some other stars avoid. By certain accounts, his recently completed work as the Joker in the next "Batman" installment may have taken him to a darker, more dangerous place than he himself expected to go.
Even, or perhaps especially, at his most tight-lipped and stoic, as the lovesick cowboy Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain," Ledger conveys the sublime inner torment that comes from willingly sacrificing everything, even your own sense of self, in exchange for a few stolen moments with an obscure object of desire, in this case the slicker, more resilient and emotionally evasive Jack Twist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal.
In the film's final seconds, alone in his trailer home some time after Jack has been brutally murdered, probably in a gay-bashing hate crime, Ennis gently fingers his friend's old shirt while surveying the ruins of his own broken life. "Jack, I swear . . . ," he says, choking up, leaving the thought unfinished, a gesture of monosyllabic eloquence that Ledger pulls off with a graceful economy few actors could muster.
Following the adage of Evelyn Waugh in "Brideshead Revisited," another great fictional work centered on a homosexual romance, Ennis learns, at a shattering price, that "to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom." What made Ledger's performance an instant touchstone for gay audiences, and earned him an Academy Award nomination for lead actor, was how he convinces us that Ennis, despite the agony it has caused him and others, considers that price to have been worth paying.
Robert Stone, Ken Kesey and others have written insightfully about how the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution and the other social upheavals of the 1960s radically altered our notions of what makes a man manly. In a single decade we flipped from John Wayne to Mick Jagger. Reflecting our confusion, the period ushered in a generation of troubled male loners (Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry, Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle).
Marlon Brando and the ever-youthful ghost of James Dean (with whom Ledger inevitably now will be compared) remain the gold standard of ambivalent masculinity in postwar Hollywood. A handful of young actors will keep trying to express those ambiguities in physical and spoken form. Gyllenhaal, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Gael García Bernal, Adrien Brody, Christian Bale and Tobey Maguire come to mind.
But one wonders when another image of a male character, or two, will take hold of the imagination as firmly as the poster design for "Brokeback Mountain." That instantly recognizable pairing of the two actors in partial profile was immediately seized on by parodists and political cartoonists, who substituted other odd couples, such as Bush and Cheney, for Ledger and Gyllenhaal. The movie's representation of the ultimate American rugged individualist, the Marlboro Man, in tears, gives rise to powerful, uncomfortable emotions at a time when America itself has been humbled and, in the eyes of much of the world, emasculated.
A colleague of mine suggested that Ledger may have been the Eli Manning of actors. Manning, the young, half-proven New York Giants quarterback who will lead his team on Super Bowl Sunday, possesses something of Ledger's articulate reticence, his knight- errant quality mixed with a slight, enduring gawkiness, his aura of a hero yet-to-be.
Whether those qualities in Ledger, and his streaks of brilliance, would have coalesced into an era-defining artist is now unknowable. All we are left with is sentence fragments, inchoate feelings, the low murmur of an unfulfilled promise. "Jack, I swear. . . ."
[email protected]
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-heath24jan24,0,3822000.story?track=ntothtml
From the Los Angeles Times
AN APPRECIATION
Heath Ledger, vulnerable male
The actor redefined what it means to be masculine
By Reed Johnson
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 24, 2008
THIS sadly underachieving decade, which the British tellingly call the "noughts," has been a troubled one for the concept of masculinity. That's been as true of Hollywood movies as it has of the increasingly nebulous entity we call the real world.
As much as any serious actor of his generation, Heath Ledger, the 28-year-old Australian who was found dead Tuesday in a Manhattan apartment, grappled on screen with the shifting, clashing ideals of what masculinity might mean at the start of the 21st century. Whether playing a heroin-addled poet, a goofy but earnest medieval knight who beats time to '70s rock tunes, a British officer determined to recoup his lost honor, a womanizing Venetian libertine or a sheep-herding cowboy who falls tragically in love with his bunkmate, Ledger wrestled, painfully and often very movingly, with trying to reconcile manhood's competing claims of duty, honor, love, sexuality, work and loyalty (to a woman, a man, a country, an ideal).
In contrast to certain of his lighter-weight contemporaries in their 20s and early 30s, Ledger didn't simply make "guy films." He seemed to steer away from the frat-house jocularity and beery "I-love-you-man!" sentimentality that so many young male performers fall back on in order to reassure their fans, their publicists and perhaps themselves that, underneath whatever sensitive, emotionally layered character they may be portraying, they still haven't lost that ol' macho swagger. Tough guys don't dance, the recently departed pugilist-novelist Norman Mailer once wrote. Neither do they tear up on screen very often, at least not if they still want to be seen as tough guys.
Ledger had a basso profundo ruggedness about him, a premature cragginess that already had begun to nip away at his youthful beauty. But he wasn't afraid to show a deeper vulnerability beneath the scrappy Aussie exterior, a self-doubt that apparently mirrored the actor's own soul. "I like to do something I fear," he told The Times in a 2005 interview. ". . . I like to be afraid of the project. I always am. . . . There's a huge amount of anxiety that drowns out any excitement I have toward the project."
It was largely that roiling anxiety and vulnerability -- and the courage to show it to the world -- that set Ledger apart from the plastic action-hero and pretty-boy Hollywood masses, and that made him especially appealing to female audiences. (If you doubt this, check out the copious digital eulogies now flooding the Internet.)
Like his namesake, Heathcliff, the brooding hero of Emily Brontë's archetypal Gothic novel "Wuthering Heights," Ledger gave vent to obsessive, over-the-top emotional states that Western popular culture, since at least the Romantic period, has more commonly assigned to women. His brave, emotionally (and often literally) naked performances, typically shorn of any protective irony, exposed him to risks that some other stars avoid. By certain accounts, his recently completed work as the Joker in the next "Batman" installment may have taken him to a darker, more dangerous place than he himself expected to go.
Even, or perhaps especially, at his most tight-lipped and stoic, as the lovesick cowboy Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain," Ledger conveys the sublime inner torment that comes from willingly sacrificing everything, even your own sense of self, in exchange for a few stolen moments with an obscure object of desire, in this case the slicker, more resilient and emotionally evasive Jack Twist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal.
In the film's final seconds, alone in his trailer home some time after Jack has been brutally murdered, probably in a gay-bashing hate crime, Ennis gently fingers his friend's old shirt while surveying the ruins of his own broken life. "Jack, I swear . . . ," he says, choking up, leaving the thought unfinished, a gesture of monosyllabic eloquence that Ledger pulls off with a graceful economy few actors could muster.
Following the adage of Evelyn Waugh in "Brideshead Revisited," another great fictional work centered on a homosexual romance, Ennis learns, at a shattering price, that "to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom." What made Ledger's performance an instant touchstone for gay audiences, and earned him an Academy Award nomination for lead actor, was how he convinces us that Ennis, despite the agony it has caused him and others, considers that price to have been worth paying.
Robert Stone, Ken Kesey and others have written insightfully about how the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution and the other social upheavals of the 1960s radically altered our notions of what makes a man manly. In a single decade we flipped from John Wayne to Mick Jagger. Reflecting our confusion, the period ushered in a generation of troubled male loners (Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry, Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle).
Marlon Brando and the ever-youthful ghost of James Dean (with whom Ledger inevitably now will be compared) remain the gold standard of ambivalent masculinity in postwar Hollywood. A handful of young actors will keep trying to express those ambiguities in physical and spoken form. Gyllenhaal, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Gael García Bernal, Adrien Brody, Christian Bale and Tobey Maguire come to mind.
But one wonders when another image of a male character, or two, will take hold of the imagination as firmly as the poster design for "Brokeback Mountain." That instantly recognizable pairing of the two actors in partial profile was immediately seized on by parodists and political cartoonists, who substituted other odd couples, such as Bush and Cheney, for Ledger and Gyllenhaal. The movie's representation of the ultimate American rugged individualist, the Marlboro Man, in tears, gives rise to powerful, uncomfortable emotions at a time when America itself has been humbled and, in the eyes of much of the world, emasculated.
A colleague of mine suggested that Ledger may have been the Eli Manning of actors. Manning, the young, half-proven New York Giants quarterback who will lead his team on Super Bowl Sunday, possesses something of Ledger's articulate reticence, his knight- errant quality mixed with a slight, enduring gawkiness, his aura of a hero yet-to-be.
Whether those qualities in Ledger, and his streaks of brilliance, would have coalesced into an era-defining artist is now unknowable. All we are left with is sentence fragments, inchoate feelings, the low murmur of an unfulfilled promise. "Jack, I swear. . . ."
[email protected]
XxpinktinksxX
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^I hope it's not true
Masseuse Called Mary-Kate Olsen Before 911
WEDNESDAY JANUARY 23, 2008 07:00 PM EST
THURSDAY JANUARY 24, 2008 10:55 AM EST UPDATED
By Kathy Ehrich Dowd and Liz McNeil
Mary-Kate Olsen and masseuse Diana Wolozin Photo by: Lucas Jackson / Reuters / Landov; Bryan Smith / Zuma
The masseuse who discovered Heath Ledger's body spoke to the actor's friend Mary-Kate Olsen twice on the phone before dialing 911, police sources confirm.
Masseuse Diana Wolozin arrived at Ledger's Manhattan apartment to give him a massage at about 2:45 p.m. on Tuesday. When he didn't come out of his bedroom, she called his cell phone and got no answer, according to the sources.
She then went inside his bedroom, saw him lying in bed, set up the massage table near his bed, and shook him. When the 28-year-old actor did not respond, the masseuse – who knew that Ledger was friends with Olsen – used the speed dial on Ledger's cell phone to call Olsen in California asking for help, the sources say.
Olsen, 21, initially told the masseuse she would call security people in New York for help. The masseuse then called Olsen back to say she would call 911 herself, the sources say.
According to reports in the New York Post and New York's Daily News, Ledger and the Olsen twin were dating.
Wolozin called 911 at 3:26 p.m. (45 minutes after her first call to Olsen.) She told authorities Ledger was not breathing and she tried to perform CPR while on the phone, but he was unresponsive.
Emergency aid workers arrived at the apartment at almost the exact same time as Olsen's security people – seven minutes later.
The source confirmed information first reported by the New York Times. It also clarifies Olsen's link to the case. Earlier rumors erroneously said that Ledger had died in Olsen's apartment.
WEDNESDAY JANUARY 23, 2008 07:00 PM EST
THURSDAY JANUARY 24, 2008 10:55 AM EST UPDATED
By Kathy Ehrich Dowd and Liz McNeil
Mary-Kate Olsen and masseuse Diana Wolozin Photo by: Lucas Jackson / Reuters / Landov; Bryan Smith / Zuma
The masseuse who discovered Heath Ledger's body spoke to the actor's friend Mary-Kate Olsen twice on the phone before dialing 911, police sources confirm.
Masseuse Diana Wolozin arrived at Ledger's Manhattan apartment to give him a massage at about 2:45 p.m. on Tuesday. When he didn't come out of his bedroom, she called his cell phone and got no answer, according to the sources.
She then went inside his bedroom, saw him lying in bed, set up the massage table near his bed, and shook him. When the 28-year-old actor did not respond, the masseuse – who knew that Ledger was friends with Olsen – used the speed dial on Ledger's cell phone to call Olsen in California asking for help, the sources say.
Olsen, 21, initially told the masseuse she would call security people in New York for help. The masseuse then called Olsen back to say she would call 911 herself, the sources say.
According to reports in the New York Post and New York's Daily News, Ledger and the Olsen twin were dating.
Wolozin called 911 at 3:26 p.m. (45 minutes after her first call to Olsen.) She told authorities Ledger was not breathing and she tried to perform CPR while on the phone, but he was unresponsive.
Emergency aid workers arrived at the apartment at almost the exact same time as Olsen's security people – seven minutes later.
The source confirmed information first reported by the New York Times. It also clarifies Olsen's link to the case. Earlier rumors erroneously said that Ledger had died in Olsen's apartment.
XxpinktinksxX
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Poor Mk
brokenenglish
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Is it 100% fact she called MK Olsen before 911?...
I don't get the reason behind that at all?... What the heck could she do to help?
That was such a bad idea.
Kind of like when Anna Nicole Smith's nurse called Howard K Stern before 911.
It makes me think something bad.
I don't get the reason behind that at all?... What the heck could she do to help?
That was such a bad idea.
Kind of like when Anna Nicole Smith's nurse called Howard K Stern before 911.
It makes me think something bad.
Amywilliams
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It is terrible that MK has been brought into this, especially with so many random rumours being thrown about.
brokenenglish
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Will the Batman movie be his final?...
I know he was working before his death, but they have scrapped that movie.
I know he was working before his death, but they have scrapped that movie.
I came to this thread to pay my respects for the passing of one of my favourite actors. So young and so talented, I was just shocked when I read about his death. He seemed a decent person, not addicted to attention like so many others in his craft. I'm truly sorry for his little daughter, for his family and friends and for Michelle. RIP Heath.
brokenenglish
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I think everyone is entitled to their emotions....
nobody should feel good or bad about feeling sad that an actor they didn't even know died tragically.
I do think the this is being covered so much by the media not b/c he was such a great young actor....
but b/c of the circumstances of his death and the obsession with celeb life.
It's so sad that they are making this such a story....
but people are eating it up and as long as that happens they will shovel it out.
Even if you have the best of intentions by going to a gossip site for the news or watching the coverage and mourning....
you are feeding the beast.
nobody should feel good or bad about feeling sad that an actor they didn't even know died tragically.
I do think the this is being covered so much by the media not b/c he was such a great young actor....
but b/c of the circumstances of his death and the obsession with celeb life.
It's so sad that they are making this such a story....
but people are eating it up and as long as that happens they will shovel it out.
Even if you have the best of intentions by going to a gossip site for the news or watching the coverage and mourning....
you are feeding the beast.
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VogueElle Addict
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rumors never are good, all my support to his friend, parents, sister and about all his little daughter
LetThemEatCake
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That's awful. Fox News though. Not surprised. They are a very conservative station.True aswell but she does have a family in Australia too. I just couldn't imagine anything worse than someone protesting and saying that Heath "deserves to be in Hell", painful enough.
The media in the US will be crazy too and of all people Perez Hilton is being very respectful about Heaths death. Also I read on his sitethat Fox News host John Gibson was laughing at the whole matter about Heath and making fun of him
, seriously what is wrong with Americans well the media, sorry I don't mean to offend Americans but they have been awful about the whole situation....
MARLOWE TIGER
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Father: Heath was devoted to his two-year-old daughter Matilda
X17
Matilda looks just like her dad
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inhirnamy137
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LetThemEatCake
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I just cant stop coming into this thread everytime I see it's been updated. Something about him was just so mysterious, he lived inside a shell almost, and the prying away of the shell/his privacy is now so magnified in this world we live in that it's hard not to want to know what other people remember him as. I wont care what the final outcome is of his death, and I dont care if we ever found out, because instead of waiting for info that wont change anything, celebrating his life and what he brought to his fans is what's most important now.
Thanks for posting that painting. It shows him, truly.
Thanks for posting that painting. It shows him, truly.
brokenenglish
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I can only think of what a private guy he was.
I imagine the media circus surrounding all this would make him cringe.
I imagine the media circus surrounding all this would make him cringe.
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