Heath Ledger

You can't call actor Logan Lerman spineless. "My whole family is in orthotics and prosthetics," he says, "so I grew up having to check for scoliosis every week. 'Come over. Let me feel your spine.' " The 17-year-old costar of "My One and Only" (with Renée Zellweger and Kevin Bacon) is also putting some backbone into his acting, despite his youth. "From a really young age, like 5 or whatever, I really wanted to do this because I really wanted to get out of school," he says with a laugh, calling from a beach at Lake Tahoe, where he's vacationing with his family.

HEATH LEDGER "Brokeback Mountain" * THE first scene Heath Ledger shot was the hardest -- and it's one of the most wrenching in "Brokeback Mountain." Over dishes after a depressing Thanksgiving, his ex-wife, played by his real-life girlfriend, Michelle Williams, confronts him with the knowledge that she knows about his affair with his friend Jack Twist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal.

The death of 28-year-old Heath Ledger, hailed as one of the great hopes among his generation of actors, was a brutal shock for Hollywood on Tuesday and grimly ended any hope that the day would be a simple celebration of this year's Oscar nominations. The Australia native was discovered nude and face-down on the bedroom floor of his Soho apartment, according to New York Police Department spokesman Paul J.

This sadly underachieving decade, which the British tellingly call the "noughts," has been a troubled one for the concept of masculinity. That's been as true of Hollywood movies as it has of the increasingly nebulous entity we call the real world.

Over a wildly eclectic 15-year movie career, Heath Ledger rose from relative obscurity in Australia to become one of the finest actors of his generation. Disappearing into many of his roles -- he could do glamorous, menacing and abject with equal ease and could flawlessly pull off American and British accents -- the actor never appeared content to rest on his professional laurels. "I don't really like to do one thing twice," Ledger told The Times in 2005.

Celebrity death: No other kind of event electrifies and illuminates so many parts of the Internet at once. Heath Ledger's sad, untimely end triggered almost instantaneous reactions in the online media, social networks and just about anywhere users could post their thoughts and multimedia memorials.

It will take up to two weeks to determine the cause of Heath Ledger's death, the New York City Medical Examiner's Office said Wednesday, but police were investigating the possibility of a drug overdose as additional details emerged about the discovery of the 28-year-old actor's body. Authorities said a rolled-up $20 bill was found near Ledger's body on the floor of his loft, and that one of the women who discovered him had phoned actress Mary-Kate Olsen before she called authorities.

The investigation into actor Heath Ledger's death Monday as a possible drug overdose is bringing attention to a nationwide health crisis: Overdose fatalities have risen dramatically in the United States since 1999, largely because of prescription drugs. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, unintentional poisoning deaths -- 95% of which are drug overdoses -- increased from 12,186 in 1999 to 20,950 in 2004.

It's time to stop the canonization of Heath Ledger. He's not a tragic hero. He's not a beautiful martyr. He's just a pretty good actor who did away with himself and broke the hearts of his family and friends, and he shouldn't get an Academy Award to memorialize his death.

Great actors, even those who have been blessed with longevity, often bear a tragic mark. It's not just the ups and downs of stardom that can make for a cruel career. Rough inner seas are typically the very reason someone seeks to be among what William Hazlitt, that lyrical witness of the early 19th century British stage, called "the motley representatives of human nature." Heath Ledger's short legacy as a screen actor offers us enough evidence of the rarity of his talent.