As the celebrity talk shows and gossip e-zines put out commemorative pieces on Heath Ledger, I thought TRU should hop on the bandwagon.
With the untimely death of a successful, well-liked actor, everyone has their own stories. Just as previous generations remember when the news circulated about James Dean, we'll remember how we heard about our own fallen celebrity.
Last Tuesday afternoon, The Round Up office was enjoying a relatively normal afternoon. Editors and reporters were working, bouncing ideas off each other, sharing YouTube videos, etc. This is how the great student newspapers are made.
Then:
"Actor Heath Ledger is dead," someone read aloud from a Web site.
Everyone stopped, those with prerogative shrieked in disbelief and the buzz swarmed the room. Shock and text messages ensued.
Subheads read, "Actor found dead in apartment," which ruled out freakish car accidents and celebrity stalker murders.
Mostly, it just seemed inconceivable. "Dead," "apartment," "pills" and "naked" seemed more appropriate for a headline about Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears, rock stars or dried-up child celebrities-someone who at least had a few stints in rehab to their name. Brad Renfro, for example, had a history with drugs. While very tragic, Renfro had been out of the spotlight for years. That's not to say his life was less significant than Ledger's, but from a media perspective, well, it was.
Admittedly, people die, and according to the U.S. Census Bureau, it happens every 11 seconds. So, perhaps the unsettling thing about Ledger's death is his age, 28, which isn't a decade older than most NMSU students. This, combined with the fact that he wasn't the party-celebrity kind, makes his passing more real to "regular people."
"Celebrity, whatever, he's a young guy and that's really sad," said a man-on-the-street interviewee on the TV Guide Channel's Heath Ledger tribute loop airing this week.
Other celebrities met their end in the past few months, including Suzanne Pleshette, Carl Karcher (of Carl's Jr. restaurants), and Ike Turner-all older people. Ledger was young-one of us. He was in his prime, and celebrity authorities are completely convinced his best was yet to come.
The latest news from the gossip sources say his death may have been from "natural causes," as there's a possibility the toxins from the pills in his system were not enough to kill him. And there was no "drug cover up," the New York Police Department reported.
Perhaps we'll never know the real reason Ledger died. Conspiracy theories will probably stand the test of time as there's no photographic evidence of his last moments alive. (Even in the case of Princess Diana's death, of which there are thousands of photographs, conspiracy buzz is still in the air.)
Ledger movie DVD sales will most likely follow a direct correlation with how much the fans will miss him. His versatile 10-year career spanned the genres, from teen comedies to period films, intense dramas to biopics. To parrot other news sources, he will be remembered as a unique actor, capable of even more than his short life allowed him.
So long, Heath.