Trailer for forthcoming film The Dark Knight

In a Hollywood career that lasted less than a decade Heath Ledger, built an impressive résumé that mixed both commercial and critical hits. He took challenging roles in controversial movies, winning an Oscar nomination two years ago for his performance as a gay cowboy in the modern western Brokeback Mountain and providing one of the incarnations of Bob Dylan in the recent I’m Not There.

Ledger was a big, muscular, blond Australian and was initially dismissed as just another pretty pin-up boy. He seemed determined to prove detractors wrong, doing much to obscure his handsome looks and plumb the despair of a series of complex characters. Inevitably there will be comparisons with James Dean and River Phoenix, who also played conflicted, alienated characters and died in their twenties, leaving behind a sense of loss and waste.

Ledger had recently followed in the footsteps of another great actor, Jack Nicholson, by playing The Joker in the new Batman movie The Dark Knight, which has finished filming and is due out in July. Talking about the role recently, Ledger was upbeat, saying it was the “most fun” he had ever had with a character. Early shots show his face covered in white paint, his eyes ringed in black, red lipstick smeared carelessly across his mouth, as he submerged himself in character once again.

Born in Perth in Western Australia in 1979, Heathcliff Andrew Ledger was the son of a mining engineer and a teacher. They were fans of Wuthering Heights. The family was a distinguished one and owned an engineering company, but from an early age Ledger wanted to act and was securing work in Australian television and films while still in his teens. He was a gay cyclist in Sweat (1996), a series about Olympic hopefuls, he appeared in Home and Away (1997) and he played an Irish chieftain fighting the ancient Romans in Roar (1997), with Queensland doubling for Ireland.

His career really took off when he co-starred with Julia Stiles in the romantic comedy 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), an update of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, with the story relocated in an American high school. It was a big hit and Ledger found himself in demand for a string of prestigious Hollywood projects.

Monster’s Ball (2001) cast him alongside Oscar-winner Billy Bob Thornton and soon-to-be Oscar-winner Halle Berry. The film proved controversial because of the central relationship between Thornton’s character and the black character played by Berry, a character whose husband has been executed. Berry won an Oscar for the role. Thornton’s and Ledger played father and son prison officers. But while Thornton’s character is an insensitive, racist bully, his son is the very opposite, embarrassing his father when he breaks down during an execution. Ledger played the role with a fierce understatement. His character asks his father if he hates him. “Yeah, I hate you. I always did,” says the father. “Well, I always loved you,” says Ledger’s character, with quiet deliberation, and then he shoots himself.

Ledger was Mel Gibson’s son in the Revolutionary War drama The Patriot (2000) and again came to a sad end. This film too was controversial with some for suggesting the Americans owed their independence to Australians and painting the British as cartoon villains.

He starred in the hit medieval comedy-drama A Knight’s Tale (2001), he was Harry Faversham in a remake of The Four Feathers (2002), which stalled badly at the box office. He returned to Australia to play the title role in Ned Kelly (2003) and had a lengthy relationship with co-star Naomi Watts.

The religious thriller The Order (2003) and Terry Gilliam’s misconceived fantasy-comedy-drama The Brothers Grimm (2005) again did disappointing business. Ledger seemed particularly uneasy in the latter in which he and Matt Damon played the eponymous heroes, a couple of ghostbusters / conmen in Germany in the early 19th Century.

In Brokeback Mountain however he delivered one of the best performances of his career, quietly projecting the internal drama and tensions of his character without need of histrionics. He and Jake Gyllenhaal play two Wyoming cowboys, or rather shepherds, who are forced to spend long, boring days in each others’ company looking after sheep on the cold and lonely mountainside.

Many previous westerns had had a homoerotic undercurrent. Brokeback Mountain brought it to the surface, prompting protests in many parts of the US, where audiences preferred to keep such themes beneath the surface. The film came under attack from social conservatives and Christian fundamentalists.

The furore was further fuelled when Ledger was quoted in an Australian paper as saying that the film faced a ban in West Virginia and that he was not surprised because lynchings had continued in the state right up until the 1980s.

Ultimately the relationship and the story were not entirely convincing — against all expectations they failed to convince Oscar voters, who opted for Crash instead as their choice for best picture, but any failings were not the fault of the actors. Ledger was nominated for the Oscar for best actor but lost to Philip Seymour Hoffman for Capote.

Reviewing the film for Rolling Stone magazine, Peter Travers said: “Ledger’s magnificent performance is an acting miracle. He seems to tear it from his insides. Ledger doesn’t just know how Ennis moves, speaks and listens; he knows how he breathes. To see him inhale the scent of a shirt hanging in Jack’s closet is to take measure of the pain of love lost.”

Ledger began a relationship with Michelle Williams, who played his wife in the film, and they had a daughter in 2005. They split up last year, with suggestions that their busy work schedule and lifestyles were to blame.

He had been working with Terry Gilliam again on a new fantasy entitled The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and had expressed an interest in making a film about Nick Drake, the English singer-songwriter, who overdosed on antidepressants in 1974. He had already shot footage to accompany Drake’s song Black Eyed Dog, which was inspired by Winston Churchill’s descriptive term for depression.

Heath Ledger, actor, was born on April 4, 1979. He was found dead on January 22, 2008, aged 28