Why I give a damn about the death of Heath Ledger

[perpetual_motion]

The thing about Heath Ledger’s death, for me, is this: I’m a huge movie fan, and I’m finally, at the age of 25, to the point in my life where I get to attach my loving eyes to certain actors and watch them for the next fifty years. My parents still track Robert Redford and Paul Newman and Meryl Streep. All fine actors. All actors I enjoy watching. But Heath Ledger, I thought, was going to be an actor for me, for my generation. I would be able to tell people, thirty years from now, that I saw Heath Ledger in Ten Things I Hate About You when it was in theaters.

Heath Ledger was going to be my Paul Newman. I was going to get to watch him be talented for decades to come. I was going to get to talk about his new movies and talk about his old movies and talk about how much I enjoyed him as an actor until I was old and brittle and bitching about the lack of true content in movies nowadays.

And it matters to me that Heath Ledger’s dead because I love movies, and I really was looking forward to watching Heath Ledger on screen and being able to say I watched him when. I’ve always thought he was talented, and I was looking forward to seeing more of that talent, and now, after The Dark Knight, I won’t get to see it in any new form again.

Comments

[perpet-fic.livejournal.com]

With a couple of very notable exceptions [The Order comes to mind], Heath Ledger also had really good taste. He seemed to go looking for nuanced roles that he could really play with, and he came up with something completely different every time. I love actors that can fuck with my head like that, and so it's a blow.