Heath Andrew Ledger was born on April 4, 1979, in Perth, Western Australia. He showed early aptitude for performance and chess — he was a state-level chess champion at ten — and attended Guildford Grammar School before moving to Los Angeles at nineteen with $1,500 and a commitment to pursue a film career. He turned down several television series preferring to wait for film roles, a decision reflecting the INFP's characteristic refusal to compromise the inner vision for immediate commercial security.
Brokeback Mountain (2005) — in which he played Ennis Del Mar, a Wyoming ranch hand whose suppressed love for another man shapes and ultimately destroys his adult life — revealed the depth of his dramatic gifts. His performance, expressed almost entirely through physical restraint and the quality of what was not said, earned him his first Academy Award nomination and established him among the most gifted film actors of his generation. His preparation involved immersing himself in Wyoming ranching culture for months before production began.
The Dark Knight (2008) gave Ledger the Joker — a role he approached with a completeness of commitment that has become legendary. He spent six weeks in a London hotel room developing the character, keeping a diary in the Joker's voice, studying the movements of hyenas and Malcolm McDowell's work in A Clockwork Orange. His performance — physically extraordinary, psychologically terrifying, possessing a quality of genuine danger that the most controlled film sets cannot entirely contain — is widely regarded as the greatest individual superhero performance in the history of the genre. He had completed his work when he died.
Ledger died on January 22, 2008, at twenty-eight, from an accidental overdose of prescription medications. He was awarded the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor posthumously in 2009, the second person in history to receive the award posthumously. His INFP quality was the engine of his approach: the total investment of the whole self in the character's reality, the inability to maintain professional distance from the more dangerous regions his work required him to inhabit. The diary he kept in the Joker's voice during preparation was not a technical exercise but an act of genuine imaginative possession.
