With all the hubbub going around regarding Heath Ledger’s posthumous Golden Globe nomination for his role The Dark Knight, Terry Gilliam’s fond obituary of Ledger does a wonderful job of cutting through the nonsense:
He was one of those blessed human beings who have the facility to do so many things at the same time. When he wasn’t acting, he was directing music videos and supporting young musicians. He was working on the script for a film he was preparing to direct. He had an incredibly artistic side, and he was practically a grand master at chess. That’s why, when he died, it was as if half of the world had collapsed.
He died halfway through the film I’m currently making, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. We had finished shooting in London on Saturday night. On Sunday, I went to Vancouver to prepare for the next stage and Heath went to New York. He was supposed to be turning up in Vancouver on the Friday. On Tuesday he was dead.
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In terms of his acting, it still rankles with me that he’s dead because he would have been streets ahead of anyone else in his generation. He just kept getting better and better. He was fearless. On Parnassus, he was improvising all the time and it was better than what we had written. I don’t normally encourage that kind of improvisation, but in a sense I felt Heath was writing this film. He was an incredibly funny performer when he wanted to be – his comic timing was just extraordinary – and then he could break your heart the next minute.
There’s something very admirable about people who throw their hand in and try earnestly to excel in a number of different fields.
Of course, it really is a great shame that all these industry figures weren’t shouting Ledger’s name from the rooftops while he was alive, but I suppose to be fair, one gets the very real sense from The Dark Knight that it would have proved a breakthrough role for his career. The world would have been quite different for Heath Ledger had he still been alive today.
Tags: Heath Ledger, Terry Gilliam, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus