An autopsy on
Heath Ledger was inconclusive, and more tests are needed,
the New York City medical examiner's office said Wednesday,
a day after the 28-year-old actor was found dead with
sleeping pills nearby.
It will take
about 10 days to complete the investigation, said Ellen
Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner.
Earlier, police
said the death was possibly caused by a drug overdose and
appeared to be accidental.
Fans left flowers
and candles outside the apartment building in
Manhattan's Soho where the body of the Oscar-nominated star
of Brokeback Mountain was found.
Khaled Ali, 41, a
stage manager for a Broadway show, dropped off a candle
on his way to work. He said he and his fellow cast members
were devastated by the news of Ledger's death.
''I felt a
connection with him as an actor, as a fellow in the theater
community,'' he said. ''With Brokeback Mountain
he touched me personally in telling the story of my
community. It was very touching.''
Ledger was known
for grueling, intense roles that became his trademark
after he got his start in teen movies like 10
Things I Hate About You.
The
Australian-born actor was found dead Tuesday by his
housekeeper and masseuse -- lying naked and facedown
at the foot of his bed, with prescription sleeping
pills nearby, police said.
It was a shocking
end to a career built on unpredictability. Ledger
avoided the safe path in favor of roles that forced him to
bury his Australian accent and downplay his
leading-man looks: a tormented gay cowboy in
Brokeback Mountain, a drug addict in
Candy, an incarnation of Bob Dylan in I'm Not There.
In what may be
his final finished performance, he took a rare role in a
guaranteed summer blockbuster, playing Batman's nemesis, the
Joker, in the upcoming The Dark Knight. But the
role was nothing he could phone in; it forced him to
rebrand a character last played on the big screen by
Jack Nicholson.
''I had such
great hope for him,'' Mel Gibson, who played Ledger's father
in The Patriot, said in a statement. ''He was
just taking off, and to lose his life at such a young age is
a tragic loss.''
Ledger split last
year with Michelle Williams, who played his wife in
Brokeback Mountain. The two had a daughter, the
now 2-year-old Matilda, and had lived together in Brooklyn's
Boerum Hill neighborhood.
Early Wednesday,
Williams and Matilda left Trollhattan, Sweden, where the
27-year-old actress had been shooting scenes for the
upcoming film Mammoth, said Martin Stromberg, a
spokesman for film production company Memfis Film.
''She received
the news at her hotel late last night,'' Stromberg said,
adding he had not spoken to the actress after she learned of
Ledger's death.
The actor's
personal strife was accompanied by professional anxiety.
Ledger said in an
interview in November that The Dark Knight and last year's I'm Not There took
a heavy toll. He said he ''stressed out a little too
much'' during the Dylan film, and had trouble sleeping
while portraying the Joker, whom he called a ''psychopathic,
mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy.''
''Last week I
probably slept an average of two hours a night,'' Ledger
told The New York Times. ''I couldn't stop
thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still
going.'' He said he took two Ambien pills, which
worked only for an hour.
News of Ledger's
death spread quickly, from the crowd of 300 people that
gathered Tuesday outside his Manhattan apartment to the
Sundance Film Festival in Utah, where those with close
ties to the actor included Naomi Watts, who dated him
after they met on the set of Lords of Dogtown, a
fictionalized story about the birth of modern
skateboarding.
Ledger was born
in 1979 in the western Australian city of Perth to a
mining engineer and a French teacher, and got his first
acting role playing Peter Pan at age 10 at a local
theater company. He began acting in independent films
as a 16-year-old in Sydney and played a gay cyclist
hoping to land a spot on an Olympic team on the 1996
television show Sweat.
Speaking in
Perth, Ledger's father called the actor's death ''tragic,
untimely, and accidental.''
Kim Ledger called
his son ''down-to-earth, generous, kind-hearted,
life-loving, unselfish'' and ''extremely inspirational to
many.''
''Heath has
touched so many people on so many different levels during
his short life,'' he said. ''Please now respect our
family's need to grieve and come to terms with our
loss privately.''
After several
independent films, Ledger moved to Los Angeles at age 19
and starred opposite Julia Stiles in 10 Things I
Hate About You, a reworking of Shakespeare's The
Taming of the Shrew. Offers for other teen
flicks came his way, but Ledger turned them down, preferring
to remain idle than sign on for projects he didn't
like.
''It wasn't a
hard decision for me,'' Ledger told the Associated Press in
2001. ''It was hard for everyone else around me to
understand. Agents were like, 'You're crazy,' my
parents were like, 'Come on, you have to eat.'''
He began to
gravitate toward more independent films after roles in
Monster's Ball, The Patriot, and A Knight's
Tale. His work in 2005's Brokeback Mountain
earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor.
In the 2006 film
Candy, Ledger played a poet wrestling with a
heroin addiction along with his girlfriend. Neil
Armfield, who directed Ledger in the film, said the actor
had ''handled his career incredibly well,'' steering
himself toward more challenging roles.
''He made a
decision about four years ago to stop being led by producers
and managers and to forge his own way,'' Armfield told
Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.
He brought the
same intensity to The Dark Knight. Glimpsed in early teaser trailers,
Ledger is more depraved and dark than comical. The
film's director, Christopher Nolan, said this month
that Ledger's Joker would be wildly different from
Nicholson's.
''It was a very
great challenge for Heath,'' Nolan said. ''He's extremely
original, extremely frightening, tremendously edgy. A very
young character, a very anarchic presence that taps
into a lot of our basic fears and panic.''
Ledger was a
widely recognized figure in his Soho neighborhood, where
Michelle Vella said she frequently saw him carrying his
2-year-old daughter on his shoulders, or having ice
cream with her.
''It's a shock;
he's so young,'' said Taren Dolbashian, who also had seen
Ledger with his daughter. ''He always seems so happy.''
Near the entrance
to the building housing his loft, about two dozen
bouquets and a dozen candles formed a makeshift memorial.
One note said,
''I couldn't find anything bad about you.'' (Tom Hays, AP)
