Many of us know him for his glorious participation as The Joker in The Dark Knight, a film for which he was awarded and worldwide cataloged as “the best Joker in history.” He was also well known for his co-starring on Brokeback Mountain. Join us to discover in this Heath Ledger net worth and biography, how his passion for acting was born, giving life to great characters.
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ToggleHeathcliff Andrew Ledger was born in Perth, Australia, on April 4, 1979. At the age of ten, his parents separated and he was left in the custody of his mother. Taking advantage of the sudden change of environment, Ledger decided to pursue his vocation among different skills: hockey, chess and acting in his school’s club, the Globe Shakespeare. The latter was encouraged by his sister, Gene Kelly, causing that at sixteen years of age he decided to leave school to dedicate himself fully to it. Heath Ledger net worth is around 20 million dollars.
In 1992, he appeared in the last ten minutes of a movie called Clowning Around , where he introduced himself as an orphan clown. Four years later, he did another small role on the television series Sweat; and from 1993 to 1997, in a children’s series called Ship to Shore, which was televised on Nickelodeon for a short period of time. All of these were filmed in Perth, his hometown.
Other projects in which he participated within Australia were the series Roar (1997), Home and Away (1997), the film Blackrock (1997), with which he debuted in the world of cinema, and Two Hands in 1999.
Finally, on this same date, he climbed to one of the most important roles in a Hollywood film called 10 Things I Hate About You. Then he participated in The Patriot (2000) and Monster’s Ball (2000), and from there, his fame only increased.
As we have seen, Ledger knew how to make a name for himself with performances as a supporting actor starting in 2000 in the aforementioned films. However, his prominence has been able to make a dent in names such as A Knight’s Tale (2001), Ned Kelly (2003), The Brothers Grimm (2005), Brokeback Mountain (2005), Casanova (2005), Candy (2006) and, for last, in The Dark Knight (2008), giving life to The Joker.
Our actor was awarded mainly for films such as Brokeback Mountain, where a love affair between two cowboys is told, and for his performance as The Joker. But what was it that made you take this latest role so seriously? since we remember that we are talking about a man who said “act for fun. “
When Christopher Nolan chose Heath Ledger to represent the new Joker, thousands of fans of the Batman saga jumped in an objection on the networks with prejudices about the actor’s previous performance in Brokeback Mountain. This amount of criticism was what prompted him to take the role extremely seriously, proving that he could even improve on Jack Nicholson’s much-acclaimed Joker.
Documentaries like I Am Heath Ledger, directed by Derik Murray and Adrian Buitenhuis, and Too Young To Die: Heath Ledger, directed by German director Dag Freyer, show the diary Ledger used to portray the iconic DC Comics villain.
Kim Ledger, his father, stated for documentary purposes that he used to lock himself in his apartment for about a month in order to develop this new character to perfection.
On the morning of January 22, 2008, Ledger was found dead in his Manhattan apartment by his housekeeper. The autopsy confirmed that his cause of death was due to an acute poisoning of drugs combined with oxycodone, diazepam, temazepam, hydrocodone, alprazolam and doxylamine.
His relatives assured him that he said he was taking medication for insomnia, a problem he constantly complained about after and during the premiere of the film The Dark Knight. Later, the actor received the posthumous Oscar for best supporting actor for this film.
Heath Ledger was, in short, a living example of improvement and success. It showed that when we invest as much time and love as possible in an activity, we can silence even the most skeptical. Of course, always taking care of our health.