With his subtle, heartbreaking, Oscar-nominated performance in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, Heath Ledger, who has died suddenly aged 28, threw off his label as a teen idol and increased his fan base 10-fold.
He had come a long way, both literally and figuratively, from his birthplace of Perth in Western Australia. His middle-class parents - his mother a French teacher and father a racing-car driver and mining engineer - somewhat perversely, named him and his sister after Emily Brontë's tragic lovers in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff and Catherine. He soon shortened it.
His first acting experience came at 10, when he was cast as Michael in a local theatre production of Peter Pan. This led to roles in children's television programmes, and a bit part in a 1992 Australian feature film Clowning Around, starring Van Johnson.
Attending a private all-boys school called Guildford grammar, Ledger excelled as an athlete - he was captain of the Kalamunda (a suburb of Perth) hockey team. This helped him get a role in the TV series Sweat (1996), about a school for the athletically gifted, in which he played a gay cyclist - one of the few homosexual characters on Australian television that was not effeminate. After a small part in Paws (1997), about a talking dog (voiced by Billy Connolly), and an appearance as a surfer in an episode of Home and Away, Ledger landed the leading role in the American TV series Roar (1997-2000) - shot in Australia - as a Celtic chieftain fighting to rid 4th-century Ireland of Roman rule.
The 18-year-old Ledger had been flown to Los Angeles for a screen test in front of studio executives. "The room was packed with suits," Ledger recalled. "After every shot, they swarmed together like a pack of ants on a sweet biscuit, whispering. It was definitely not my best performance, but something must have gone right."
Ledger's "Braveheart" portrayal got Hollywood interested in him. Before leaving for California to take up various offers, he played a naive doorman of a strip club who gets involved with gangsters in Two Hands (1999), shot vividly in Sydney's notorious King's Cross district.
Ledger then moved to Los Angeles, where he gained the part of Patrick Verona, a long-haired, undisciplined boy at Padua high school, who takes a bribe to invite shrewish Kate Stratford (Julia Stiles) to the prom in 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), an updated, overly-contrived teen-pic version of The Taming of the Shrew. Ledger, who exudes a natural charm, has a show-stopping scene when he sings Can't Take My Eyes Off You to Kate over loud speakers on the athletic field.
In the preposterous The Patriot (2000), Ledger played Mel Gibson's eldest son who signs up to fight the Red Coats during the Revolutionary Wars of 1776. According to the New York Times, who called Ledger a "somewhat remote hunk", Gibson "in their scenes together, almost seems to be directing Mr Ledger on screen, and the younger actor responds with an exasperated bashfulness that makes him less cool and more likable." If nothing else, the film cemented Ledger's teen appeal as America's hunk of choice.
The dumb-and-dumber A Knight's Tale (2001) did nothing to dispel this view - au contraire. Even though Ledger, with his tousled blond surfer looks plays the jouster-cum-rock star in 14th-century England with his tongue firmly in his cheek, he could not avoid being hunk-like. With this in mind, he took the comparatively small role of the weak son of a death-row guard in Monster's Ball (2001), who vomits while escorting a condemned man to the chair.
It was back to action in the fifth (feeble) remake of the colonial adventure The Four Feathers (2002), in which he was a coward who redeems himself and, a return to his homeland, in the shakily Irish-accented title role in Ned Kelly (2003), the 19th-century outlaw. Neither film did anything for Ledger's acting reputation, though he continued to feature on magazine covers and gossip columns. Off-screen, he dated actors Naomi Watts, Lisa Zane and Heather Graham.
His renegade Catholic priest in The Order (2003) and his drunk and stoned skate-boarding guru in Lords of Dogtown (2005) added to the gloom. There was no respite with Terry Gilliam's wearisome The Brothers Grimm (2005), in which he and Matt Damon played the 19th-century German fairytale writers with dubious English accents.
Brokeback Mountain could not have come at a better time for Ledger. This poignant story of forbidden love between two young ranch-hands, played tenderly by Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, gained both actors wide admiration. Ledger is particularly effective as the more stoical and taciturn of the two. "Bottom line is... we're around each other an'... this thing, it grabs hold of us again... at the wrong place... at the wrong time... and we're dead," he says, struggling to articulate his emotions.
"The challenge was to capture the stillness of him," Ledger said of the role. "I have a kind of semi-frantic, nervous energy. Harnessing that was something I thought I'd have to work out. Shooting in the wilderness, the stillness became like this innate quality."
Unfortunately, there was an inevitable dip from this high spot with the limp Casanova (2005) and the familiar Candy (2006), about Australian drug addicts. But Ledger, who recently finished playing The Joker in The Dark Knight, the new Batman movie, had proved that he was not just a pretty face. There is no doubt that he would have had an illustrious career in front of him.
He is survived by his two-year-old daughter by Michelle Williams, who played his wife in Brokeback Mountain.
Heath Ledger, actor, born April 4 1979; died January 22 2008