Don’t let anyone ever make you feel you don’t deserve what you want - Heath Ledger
Zeal - noun - great energy or enthusiasm in pursuit of a cause or an objective
During his life, Heath Ledger embodied charm and charisma not to mention great looks. With the combination of these traits combined with a lust for life, Heath Ledger was a casting directors dream.
He was the guy who would show up at your door unannounced at 7 a.m. for breakfast, or load his friends into a motorhome for an impromptu trip to Mexico, or pour everything he had into his work. Heath Ledger‘s friends and family say the star crackled with life and lived each moment to the fullest before his death at age 28 in 2008.
Heath’s closest friends say he had a kinetic energy with everything he did — whether deeply focusing on his daily game of chess or requiring that his friends join him on the dance floor.
“He demanded that we dance every Friday night at a placed called La Cita,” Amato says. “Every Friday night, no matter what happened, we just had to go dance, and the more people we could bring, the better. It would just be this kind of tribal stomping around — and he was always so happy doing that.
Seizing the day was an understatement for Ledger, he was the type of guy who to take a road trip to Mexico and take 30 people rather than stay home and have a cup of coffee. The world got a taste of that intensity through his work, including his haunting performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight.
When he found out he was offered the part of the Joker, he said he immediately smiled and thought to himself, Yes, because there’s a joker inside every one of us.’ He realized that his joker was just beneath the surface and ready to come out. He did dig deep to find it … but I think it was an immediate response for him.”
Intensity, says Ledger’s sister Kate, is a family trait.
“We have got a lot of non-stop energy in our family,” she says. “We don’t really sit still for long.”
She adds that winding down after a long day on set was especially challenging for him: “I mean, of course, he slept, but there were times — particularly when he was working — that it was just hard because he was just simply like a washing machine on spin cycle.”
Ledger not only lived life to the fullest, he embodied the very spirit of someone who knew that life is, in fact, short and meant to be savored. His love for film was just many of his enduring traits. In 2018 it has been 10 years since Heath Ledger passed.
He will forever be missed.