It's a terrible loss, because he was clearly shaping up to be one of the most versatile, convincing and impressive actors of his generation - they are few and far between.
What I feel most angry about is the suggestion that, perhaps, Heath's death was related to the toll that media interest had taken upon him.
It is a truism that every actor whose work becomes prominent in the public eye will become seen as public property - and Heath was a phenomenal talent, who achieved a tremendous amount while still very young. Is such a tendency the 'pay off' for asking that people spend time, money and energy aspiring to empathise with you (or rather, the characters you portray)? That you, the actor, become, in effect, the 'property' of the audience, your personal life free for them to dissect and discuss at will? Perhaps - and I'm not certain it hasn't always been this way - look at James Dean, or Rudolph Valentino.
But I also believe that the intensity of media intrusion into the private lives of performers seems worse now than it has ever been. And it saddens me tremendously because an actor of Heath Ledger's talents simply did not deserve to be hounded so relentlessly by the media. As a wonderful actor, he was, in many ways, the very last person equipped to deal with such continuous pressure - because, as is true of all great actors, at heart, he must have been a tremendously sensitive, empathetic, questioning individual, who held only the wish to become a superb artist and performer, and bring enjoyment and awareness to his audience, and who had no truck with having his own private life minutely taken apart for everyone to gawp at.
Yet, sadly, we live in a world obsessed with 'reality shows', and people who are famous 'for being famous' - the effect of this is pernicious, because it feeds a media expectation that the lives of anyone 'famous' is fair game for them. Certainly, those who have no claim to embody anything other than notoriety actively court all the publicity they can get, and care nothing for their own dignity. But to treat genuine talents in the same way, individuals who have no desire for 'fame', but only a desire to do the job that they have always loved doing, to tell the stories they always felt needed telling - to treat them in such a way is a tragic thing.
He'll be sorely missed now he's gone.
