Jun 30 2008
Biography
Born: 4 April 1979
Where: Perth, Australia
Height: 6′ 1″
Died: 22 January 2008 New York City, USA
He was born Heath Andrew Ledger on the 4th of April, 1979, at the Subiaco Hospital in Perth, Western Australia. The Ledger name was well-known in Perth, the family having run a foundry that provided much of the raw material for the famous Perth to Kalgoorlie Pipeline, which ran 557 kilometres east out into the desert and, beginning to pump back in 1903, first supplied the Western Australian goldfields and now served over 100,000 people and 6 million sheep in 44,000 square miles. The Sir Frank Ledger Charitable Trust, named after Heath’s great-grandfather, was renowned for granting funds to the area’s universities, paying for visiting lecturers and scholarships for gifted students.
In keeping with the family tradition, Heath’s father Kim, a racing enthusiast, ran several engineering firms in the city, while Heath’s mother, Sally, hailing from the Scottish Campbell clan, was a French teacher. High romantics, they named their son after Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff having some four years earlier called their first-born daughter Catherine (she’d be known as Kate). There would be two more half-sisters, Olivia and Ashleigh, born to Kim and Sally respectively once they had separated. This would happen when Heath was 10. By then he’d already enrolled at the Guildford Grammar School, an all-boy academy set on 100 glorious hectares of undulating land beside the Swan river, some 15 kilometres to the north-east of the city. For 10 years this would be the seat of Heath’s education. Dedicated to “the growth and freedom of young minds and bodies”, it had vast playing fields, horse riding facilities and even its own farm. Students could go rowing on the river or test themselves in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. The choir sang in the Chapel of St Mary and St George, one of the finest and most imposing examples of gothic architecture in Australia.
Ledger’s older sister, Kate, an actress and later a publicist, with 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. Heath’s and Kate’s other siblings include two half-sisters, Ashleigh Bell , his mother’s daughter with her second husband and his stepfather Roger Bell, and Olivia Ledger), his father’s daughter with second wife and his stepmother Emma Brown.
Ledger was an avid chess player, winning Western Australia’s junior chess championship at the age of 10. As an adult, he often played with other chess enthusiasts at Washington Square Park. Allan Scott’s film adaptation of the chess-related 1983 novel The Queen’s Gambit, by Walter Tevis, which at the time of his death he was planning both to perform in and to direct, would have been Ledger’s first feature film as a director.
Among his most-notable romantic relationships, Ledger dated actress Heather Graham for several months in 2000 to 2001, and he had a serious on-and-off-again long-term relationship with actress Naomi Watts, whom he met during the filming of Ned Kelly and with whom he lived at times from 2002 to 2004. In the summer of 2004, he met and began dating actress Michelle Williams on the set of Brokeback Mountain, and their daughter, Matilda Rose, was born on 28 October 2005 in New York City. Matilda Rose’s godparents are Ledger’s Brokeback co-star Jake Gyllenhaal and Williams’ Dawson’s Creek castmate Busy Philipps. Problems with paparazzi in Australia prompted Ledger to sell his residence in Bronte, New South Wales and move to the United States, where he shared an apartment with Williams, in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, from 2005 to 2007. In September 2007, Williams’ father, Larry Williams, confirmed to Sydney’s Daily Telegraph that Ledger and Williams had ended their relationship. After his break up with Williams, in late 2007 and early 2008, the tabloid press and other public media linked Ledger romantically with supermodels Helena Christensen and Gemma Ward and with former child star, actress Mary-Kate Olsen.
