Article Last Updated: 12/24/2005 06:42 PM

Don't call him "Casanova"
With 2 new films and a baby daughter, Heath Ledger has turned his professional and personal lives around
By Bob Strauss, Film Writer, Los Angeles Daily News
U-Entertainment

Heath Ledger calls from a phone store in New York. For the better part of two weeks, he's been trying to get his cell number switched.

This has rendered the actor effectively incommunicado during a period when one of the many movies he's been in this year, "Brokeback Mountain," has won most 2005 film critics' awards - and his performance in it has emerged as one of the season's leading Oscar possibilities.

Some time to be cut off from eager entertainment reporters, huh? Ledger could not be happier about it.

"I didn't have a cell phone for a week last week," the 26-year-old actor laughs in his gravelly Australian accent. "But I didn't look on that as a problem at all."

That's because even amid the greatest acclaim of his career and with a new movie, "Casanova," opening today , Ledger has much more important matters to attend to. His first child, Matilda, was born at the end of October. And all he and the baby's mother, Michelle Williams (who played the wife of Ledger's character in "Brokeback"), really want to do right now is stay in their Brooklyn apartment and lavish attention on the newborn.

"It's obviously an honor, and it's exciting," Ledger says of his critics-group citations and Golden Globe nomination for playing Ennis Del Mar , "Brokeback's" tough Wyoming ranch hand who can't understand his love for a fellow cowboy, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. "But Michelle and I don't wake up and talk about awards or the season. We've got our daily routine we're sticking to, and we've got a beautiful distraction these days.

"The best thing is just waking up every day, giving and teaching your little child," he says of parenthood. "The toughest thing? There is none, it's just an absolute pleasure. I really, honestly can't say that there's anything tough. Even the exhaustion from lack of sleep, it's just a pleasure to have this form of exhaustion."

Despite the blessed distraction, Ledger is surely pleased with how things are turning out on the professional front. The recent body of work - which included transformational performances in the skateboard saga "The Lords of Dogtown," one of the title roles in Terry Gilliam's elaborate fantasy "The Brothers Grimm" and the drug-addict love story "Candy," an Australian production awaiting U.S. release - was a self-engineered break with a series of decreasingly successful, creatively uninspired commercial product that included "The Order," "Four Feathers" and "A Knight's Tale."

"I started to get bored," Ledger explains, "not with the choices I was making, because I didn't really have a choice. The choices were being made for me - I was being thrown into projects. So I kind of put the brakes on that. In a sense, I destroyed my career to rebuild it again. So this last year and a half has been me rebuilding and reshaping it. And kind of just testing myself. I really want to push myself, push the envelope. 'Grimm' was the first of that. Then I tried to take right turns with each project."

"Casanova," Ledger freely admits, was the most conventional choice of the new lot.

"It's not Fellini's 'Casanova,' " he says. "It's ('Chocolat' director) Lasse Hallstrom's/Walt Disney's. A comedy, hopefully. Look, it's a paycheck and a big bowl of pasta."

Set in 18th-century Venice, the film has virtually nothing to do with the historical Giacomo Casanova, other than appropriating his reputation as the world's most legendary lover.

"Just out of curiosity, I got into a couple of volumes of Casanova's journals," Ledger says. "He's certainly an interesting man. A lot more interesting than the character I'm playing in the movie. I mean, my version is a completely sugarcoated version of the real man. I don't do any justice to him whatsoever, and I certainly wasn't trying to."

Yet even this sanitized Disney production has managed to stir up controversy by garnering an R rating, despite every effort to downplay the story's implicit eroticism.

"I think it's unfortunate that the movie's gotten an R rating," Ledger says. "Had we known it was going to get an R, we would have made it a little closer to deserving it. We would've pumped up the sexual content and gone to town. As it is, I don't see anything R rated in it whatsoever. There's no sex, there's no profanity. It's pathetic, really."

Having grown up in the more open, beach-culture city of Perth, Western Australia, Ledger clearly has difficulty understanding the puritanical side of American culture. The "Casanova" rating tussle is nothing, of course, compared to the outcry over that gay Western he made. Despite its critical acclaim and early box office success, "Brokeback" has been decried by conservative pundits and its trailers snickered at by discomforted moviegoers.

And even after Tom Hanks won an Oscar for playing a gay man in "Philadelphia," the prospect of two hot young actors having unapologetic sex with each other on screen was still thought by some to be a career-killer.

Ledger admits that he had second thoughts about playing Ennis. But they weren't those kind.

"I'm always very back-and-forth about any role that I'm chosen for," he says. "Quite literally, after getting a role, I'll call my agent and say, 'How do I get out of this? I can't do it, I shouldn't do it, I fooled them,' and this was no exception to that rule.

"But I know what you're getting at. People in the past, I guess, have been nervous. They connected it to being a risk and personal fears and anxieties. But I guess I never felt I was putting anything at risk. I am quite ruthless about my career, it doesn't matter if it left. And if it left because of making a creative choice of this nature, then why would I want to be in an industry that does that? I looked at it as a beautiful opportunity to work with brilliant material and a brilliant director."

That director, Ang Lee ("Sense and Sensibility," "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"), explains why Ledger was so perfect for the confused, taciturn, self-denying Ennis.

"Heath struck me as a good anchorman to carry that Western mood," the Taiwanese filmmaker says. "That brooding, nonverbal, elegiac sense of fear and violence. He's a good man to carry a lot of those melancholy, mystery-of-the-West characteristics."

Ledger, on the other hand, claims to be light-years away from anyone like Ennis. And not just when it comes to sexual preferences.

"I could have actually taught Ennis something about loving," Ledger confidently asserts. "Unlike him, I enjoy love, I'm very expressive, I've investigated love. And he didn't."

Evidence backs that up. While they played out one of the worst marriages imaginable for Ang Lee's cameras, Ledger and Williams were actually falling in love.

"If anything, it made it more interesting," Ledger reckons. "I think it would've been more boring if we were in love on screen, it would've been easy and obvious. We were workin' against the odds here! And it was out of our control, it was just something very beautiful and deep."

"I honestly don't remember the two experiences existing together; they felt really separate," recalls former "Dawson's Creek" regular Williams. "But maybe it was that thing of finding order in chaos - that sensation kind of rings true to me. There were so many unknowns during the day while we were working, that we managed to find a little bit of order in the off-set time."

Ledger uses similar terms to describe how his life has changed. For all of the conscious engineering that went into it, he still can't believe that he's enjoying such a rewarding year.

"No," Ledger says. "I was certainly hoping for one. It just seems to me that when you clean your act up and start ironing out kinks in your life, whether professional or social, synchronicity follows. I feel like I was very much focusing more on chaos theories in the past, and now the chaos has kind of washed away and, like anything chaotic, left something beautiful. My life is just working, it's a well-oiled machine at the moment."

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Bob Strauss