THIS BLASTED HEATH

My thoughts keep being drawn, rather unexpectedly, to the poignant death of the film actor Heath Ledger on Tuesday. Many public figures die every month, including (lately) some whom I have admired enormously (Karlheinz Stockhausen, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman), some I didn’t care much for (Alan Coren, Boris Yeltsin, Bernard Manning), some whom I personally encountered (Ned Sherrin, George Melly, Sheridan Morley) and some whom I knew quite well when I was in the business (Verity Lambert, Tony Holland, Claude Whatham). But I suppose there is a particular sadness about the loss of someone so young, so full of promise and with so clear a path to achievement beckoning him.

Ledger appeared in his full share of execrable movies. Actors don’t set out to perpetrate twaddle, any more than writers, producers or directors do, though they no doubt accept some roles knowing that the rewards therein offered are not primarily those of artistic satisfaction. Ledger gave two performances that will have stretched and matured him and that demonstrated his seriousness, ambition and daring as an actor. In Monster’s Ball he took a relatively small role in a small movie, a decision that many an agent would have advised against but that he clearly (and rightly) saw as a gesture that would speak of his determination to do good work and that might bring him more nourishing offers. That nourishment came in Brokeback Mountain and he painted himself into cinema iconography. With his career abruptly terminated, this last will forever stand as his defining role.

Most people interested in cinema as art rather than candyfloss will have recognized the quality of Ledger’s performance as Ennis del Mar in Ang Lee’s movie of the Annie Proulx short story about two cowboys who fall into a love affair. It has been suggested in some quarters that old-school Hollywood homophobia denied the Academy Award to both actor and film (director and adapted screenplay did both win, however). The argument may hold for the best film award (which went to the relatively meretricious Crash – and I certainly don’t mean the remarkable David Cronenberg movie of that name). But the actor award that year was justly won by Philip Seymour Hoffman for his no less gay and certainly no less achieved assumption of the role of Truman Capote.

Perhaps it is only for a gay man like me that Ledger’s achievement in Brokeback can hold such resonance. I am acutely reminded of another premature death in American cinema, more than 14 years ago now, that of the hauntingly beautiful and unknowable River Phoenix. That shocking departure inevitably played second fiddle to the death, on the same day, of Federico Fellini but in time it came to be seen as a major loss.

Five years younger than Ledger at his death, Phoenix had already established a range and depth – in Stand By Me, The Mosquito Coast and Running on Empty especially – that spoke of a thoughtfulness beyond his years. But his signature role was that of Mike Waters, the narcoleptic rent boy in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. Like Ledger’s Ennis, this performance was wholly authentic and intensely moving. Both actors, it seems clear, understood the overarching socio-political significance of the material.

So we gay men are grateful – pathetically so, because we don’t get all that much to celebrate in (relatively) mainstream cinema (and by roadshow standards these of course were minority projects) – to these actors for taking us so seriously and going in to bat for us. I could have done without Ledger’s callow performance at the 2005 Oscar ceremony when, in introducing the nomination of Brokeback as best film in tandem with his much better behaved co-star Jake Gyllenhall, he lapsed into giggling and squirming more befitting a 12 year-old. But you can’t have everything. Ledger did the full promotional circus on the movie’s behalf and was properly short with the more stupid questions.

To leave a lasting mark on the world before you are 30, let alone a mark that does you credit, is some achievement and Ledger’s family in Australia, stoically insisting that his death was an accident, are understandably determined not to let that achievement be tarnished by rumour and speculation. The immediate autopsy has proved inconclusive. Whatever cause of death is finally determined – if indeed one can be – is of far less true interest than the actor’s small body of work. It will be Ledger’s fate, like Eddie Cochran, Arthur Rimbaud, Franz Schubert, Joe Orton, Keith Haring and so many others, to be defined, at least in part, by living for a short time. But at least they all got the chance to leave something by which they are remembered.