Ledger's unhappiness lets us off hook

It was a measure, perhaps, of his less-than-ideal existence that when Heath Ledger was discovered unconscious by his masseuse on that Tuesday afternoon last month, it wasn't the emergency services she called, but Mary-Kate Olsen.

That the actor didn't call 911 either but summoned private security guards to Ledger's home confirmed what we already knew: that the planet most celebrities inhabit is a barren and remote one. None of these people was said to have obstructed the authorities in any way. But if, as seems the case, Ledger was once a down-to-earth sort of guy, then the world he was living in prior to his death wasn't exactly paradise.

Reactions to the news were of the order of amazement that greeted the death of the BBC presenter Jill Dando nine years ago; it was too weird to get a hold on. A lot of people heard it first on the 10 o'clock news, and it took a beat to place the name, followed by a mental image of Ledger in a cowboy hat, squinting across an endless cattle range.

The era of restraint in these matters has long since gone, but there was a relish to the coverage that was unsurpassed by anything we have seen in recent years: the photo of Ledger being removed from the apartment block on a stretcher; the size of the media scrum outside the Brooklyn home of his child's mother. For three days, US networks have been broadcasting live outside the Frank E Campbell funeral home on Manhattan's Upper East Side, as if it were Bagram airbase. And the sense of weirdness hasn't abated.

The scale of the shock has in part to do with Ledger's blamelessness: He wasn't on anyone's radar for anything but good acting. Unlike Leonardo DiCaprio at the height of his fame, he didn't carouse around town in a rat pack. He hadn't, as far as we know, ever thrown a phone at a hotel desk clerk.

He started acting in his teens, but he was never a child star and didn't suffer from any lag between his talent and his exposure. Apart from being good at his job, he had, simply, a nice face, which together with cultural assumptions about his nationality, inclined one to think he must be naturally sunny and well grounded.

"People have demons," said William H Macy, sprung for a reaction on the red carpet at the Sundance film festival and dolefully finding the right one. "Sometimes it's hard to see them."

Elsewhere, the comet trail of bit-players in Ledger's life has started to take shape on the news networks. A gay Australian cowboy called Adam Sutton, who worked with Ledger before his role in Brokeback Mountain, is being comforted through his grief by (who else?) Olivia Newton-John; a man who says he was supposed to have dinner with Ledger on the very night of his death testifies to the fact that he only ever saw the actor drink water.

There is a question as to what we want from these people and what it means when they decline to give it to us. Movie stars have two choices when it comes to their tabloid alter egos - to be train wrecks or to have the good grace to be fabulous and infallible. Before he split up with Michelle Williams, his co-star in Brokeback Mountain, Ledger fell into the latter category, their life together as a cool young family in Brooklyn appearing, through the lens of the showbiz press, as a kind of idealized normality. The system doesn't support anything more shaded than that, and after they split up, the suggestion that Ledger was unhappy in a rather ordinary way, taking anti-anxiety pills and sleeping for two hours a night, is a rebuke not only to our expectations of him but also to the whole idea of what it takes to be content.

If you are young, rich, beautiful, talented, haven't been to rehab yet and still can't get it right, then the rest of us might as well be happy with what we've got. There must be a small, unpleasant part of our shock that is rooted in relief; it lets us off the hook.

The Guardian

(China Daily 02/13/2008 page9)