Heath Ledger, dead at 28

RIP.

This fucking sucks.

Heath Ledger, the Australian-born actor whose breakthrough role as a gay cowboy in the 2005 movie “Brokeback Mountain” earned him a nomination for an Academy Award and comparisons to the likes of Marlon Brando, was found dead Tuesday in an apartment in Manhattan with sleeping pills near his body, the police said.

The police said Mr. Ledger, 28, was found naked on the floor near the bed in an apartment in SoHo that he had been renting. The chief police spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said the police did not suspect foul play.

I'll admit it. I am a aprt of this cult of celebrity. I wept at the news. Maybe for the same reason as these folks said in this NYTimes story:

Others in the crowd said their first reaction was disbelief. Nicole Vaughan, 24, a law student at New York University, was in a seminar about Jesus when someone sent her a message about Mr. Ledger. She checked the Web, then walked to the apartment “because of the way our generation is; we sort of feel we’re a part of each other’s lives.”

Vanessa Yuille, 29, a record-company manager who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said her vigil outside the apartment building was a way of paying tribute to what Mr. Ledger did the night she saw him in a Williamsburg restaurant last summer. “A guy fell off a motorcycle in front of the restaurant,” she said, “and it was Heath Ledger who went to see if the guy was all right.”

Does it make it any different if he killed himself? Or if it was an OD by accident? Or a by-product of pneumonia? Does it? Why so serious, Joker? Why so serious?