Contributing editor Peter Biskind travels to Pinewood Studios outside London to view Ledger's last movie, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which he calls a "piñata exploding with brightly colored gewgaws, as if Gilliam were afraid the movie police would lift his license, and this would be his last shoot." He deems the film "good enough to remind us that Ledger's death deprived the movies of one of their most accomplished talents." Biskind's interviews include director Terry Gilliam, a close friend of Ledger, Cinematographer Nicola Pecorini, and Steven Alexander, Ledger's agent and friend, along with other "insiders." They discuss Ledger's rise to fame, personal life, drug abuse and death, and his final performance.

In the Vanity Fair piece, Ledger is compared several times to Johnny Depp, first in the trajectory of his career, and later in his portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight. The analogy is an apt one, especially since Depp, along with Colin Farrell and Jude Law, replaced Ledger in Doctor Parnassus after Ledger's tragic death. Throughout the article, Ledger comes off as every bit the tortured artist; he is portrayed shying away from his growing fame, a reluctant celebrity, more artist than movie star. We present you with several highlights from the illuminating 11-page story, which reads as a sweet, if occasionally sensationalized, tribute to the actor.

Alexander on Ledger's reluctance to be a heartthrob or matinee idol:

He wasn't motivated by money or stardom, but by the respect of his peers, and for people to walk out of a movie theater after they'd seen something that he'd worked on and say, ‘Wow, he really disappeared into that character.' He was striving to become an ‘illusionist,' as he called it, able to create characters that weren't there.

On Ledger's unsteady, and sometimes unwanted, rise to fame:

After Brokeback Mountain and Casanova, released the same year, in which he had unhappily starred for director Lasse Hallstrom, Ledger was so distressed he wanted to stop working. (He did stop for a year and a half after his daughter, Matilda, was born on October 28, 2005.) He told his friends that one of the reasons he had taken The Dark Knight was that it would be such a long shoot it would give him an excuse to turn down other offers. In fact, a few years earlier he had met with director Christopher Nolan regarding the title role in the first of his Batman films, Batman Begins, but the actor was reluctant to become involved in a franchise.

Although the focus is primarily on Ledger's career, there are a few paragraphs detailing his relationship with Michelle Williams (who declined to be interviewed for the article):

According to Gilliam and Pecorini, the pair were too different for the romance to last. "My impression was that they had nothing in common," says Pecorini. "They didn't fit. They kept two separate lives. She never mingled with his friends-he never mingled with her friends." The two men say that the couple's relationship mimicked the marriage between the characters they played in Brokeback Mountain, with hers, lonely and resentful, watching his [sic] go off on his mysterious fishing trips… Gilliam and Pecorini agree that the romance began to unravel during the Oscar campaign for Brokeback Mountain, when Williams was nominated for best supporting actress alongside Ledger's nomination for best actor. For him, they say, the Oscars were a kind of game that he went along with grudgingly, whereas Williams took the hoopla more seriously.

On his drug use:

Pecorini says Ledger's drug use-"He used to smoke marijuana on a regular basis, like probably 50 percent of Americans"-became an issue. "From that moment, he went clean as a whistle. He was so bloody clean that he didn't drink a glass of wine anymore." Ads Gerry Grennell, who was Ledger's voice coach and shared houses, meals and down-time with the actor, "Heath loved good food and good wine. From the rehearsal period on Dark Knight, right up to the last days in London, when we worked and lived together and went out for dinner, Heath would happily go to the bar, buy a round of drinks for friends, and come back and have a soda or juice, never once drinking alcohol."

On his chronic insomnia and eventual death:

"Everyone has a different view of how he passed way," says Grennell. "From my perspective, and knowing him as well as I did, and being around him as much as I was, it was a combination of exhaustion, sleeping medication, which was doing less good than it was harm, and perhaps the aftereffects of the flu. I guess he just stopped breathing."

Says Gilliam, "He desperately wanted to sleep. And he finally got the big sleep. I don't know if it was the combination of his tiredness with his emotional state. I wish I had the answer. It really bothers me that I can't make sense out of it. There was nothing grand or dramatic about it. It just happened. It's still a big mystery."

On his final performance, as Tony in Doctor Parnassus:

In a complex and difficult part, he gives us everything we have learned to expect from him, and then some. A puzzle at the heart of a puzzle, his character gives him license to essay a blizzard of guises, calls upon him to be appealing, vulnerable, and frightening, all at the same time; he provides a whole new definition of identity theft. And in all these versions of Tony, the actor is wholly present, entirely in the moment, investing them with almost uncanny immediacy. As Audsley says, "with all due respect to the other actors in the piece, who are all terrific, the film really only leaps into life when Heath appears."

The Last Of Heath [Vanity Fair]

Reports the Times:

Lighted by sparkling chandeliers, the hall is 100 feet by 25 feet, with a soaring 22-foot-high coffered ceiling in gilt and lacquer. The walls are embellished with gilt cherubs, roses, feathers, foliage and birds. Enormous and richly hued paintings in elaborate jeweled frames depict romantic, mythological and biblical scenes.

58-year-old Dr. Anthony Walter of Houston was a successful orthopedic surgeon before recuperation from illness turned him onto art. Since, hand-painting, gilding, inlaying and carving his palatial home (which takes elements from the Vatican, Versailles and St. Paul's) has become his full-time job, "a tribute to his wife, Susan... meant to teach others how to achieve God’s salvation through marital love. It is also his take on Christianity."

Walter's goal was not merely to portray the Bible in a clearly understandable way, but to "say with my decorative art... that morality is accepting the consequences of your actions, which no one is willing to do these days,” which is why the paintings have themes like charity and repentance. The tableaux of his wife are somewhat less traditional, described as portraying Walter "in a toga or courtly garb reaching passionately for her or bowing before her." Susan, a retired lawyer, for her part, says “'I get a little embarrassed sometimes...But it certainly makes me feel special.'”

The project alternately strikes one as a touching tribute, an impressive display of discipline, and a testament to great hubris, the latter impression enforced by grandiose statements like, "I am a huge threat (to modern art museums) because what I have done renders everything they have junk...I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant but the reaction of people who come in here tells me the power of it.” It's tempting to wonder if part of the reaction is merely stupefaction at the scale and grandeur of the project. Of course, Taj Mahal-style tributes are always about both giver and muse, so it's probably unfair to criticize the undertaking on that ground. What's interesting is that like Laura or Beatrice, his wife seems to have had no choice in becoming part of a grandiose moral allegory or the embodiment of "good." That's probably in keeping with the traditional role of a muse, but it's still somewhat disconcerting to see it acted out so literally in this day in age - a tribute to classical art, indeed. Or a testament to the dangers of early retirement.

At Houston Surgeon’s Home, An Ode To His Wife And To God [New York Times]

black is brown is tan
is girl is boy
is nose is face
is all the colors
of the race

For those who have never heard of her, Mildred Loving was an African-American woman who, with her white husband Richard, changed the United States' miscegenation laws by taking the state of Virginia — which regarded their union as illegal — to court and, with a June 12, 1967 decision in her and her husband's favor, effectively dismantled the laws in that state and 15 others that prohibited intermarriage between the races. Mildred Loving, as you also may or may have have heard, has just died at the age of 68 of undisclosed causes. (Richard Loving was killed in a car accident in 1975.)

Mildred and Richard had some formidable foes. Although some states' anti-miscegenation laws came to include other ethnic groups, as Werner Sollors says in his book Interracialism, "all such laws restricted marriage choices of blacks and whites, making the black-white divide the deepest and historically most pervasive of all American color lines." Certainly, Loving vs. Virginia was not the only factor in the rapidly growing number of black/white unions and marriages during '60s and '70s, but it was an important one, and a strong indicator that something new was happening between blacks and whites in the second half of the 20th century, something more concerned with love than hate. (Those who are better schooled in these matters than I am, please elaborate in the comments.)

What I find both fascinating and inspiring is that the generation of biracial (a term I am using here to describe those with one black parent and one white parent) Americans born in the fifteen years after Loving vs. Virginia, is a generation that has, in recent years come of age both in the public and private spheres. All over the airwaves, bookshelves and movie screens one can see representatives of this generation, from athletes (Derek Jeter, Jason Kidd, James Blake) to entertainers (Halle Berry, Lisa Bonet, Mariah Carey) to writers and thinkers (Rebecca Walker, Danzy Senna and Zadie Smith). This is no coincidence: According to figures made available by Race Branch of the United States Census Bureau, the number of interracial (black/white) couples in the United States in 1960 numbered 51,000. Ten years later (almost three years after Loving), the number had risen 27.4% to 65,000 and by 1980 that number had almost doubled, coming in at 121,000. The numbers of children borne from such unions grew just as quickly: the 2000 Census states that there were 4,850 biracial Americans born in 1967; the same census puts the number born in 1977 at 9,261, almost double the number born ten years earlier, and five years later, in 1982, 14,125 biracial children came into the world in the United States. And we are better for it. As the AP reports today, "In a rare interview... last June, Loving said she wasn't trying to change history — she was just a girl who once fell in love with a boy. 'It wasn't my doing,' Loving said. 'It was God's work.'"

Mildred Loving, Matriarch Of Interracial Marriage, Dies
Related: Who Are We Now? New Dialogue On Mixed Race [NY Times]
Black Is Brown Is Tan [Amazon]
Loving Vs. Virginia [Wikipedia]