-
Jan 23, 2008 07:10 AM ET
- by Ken Fox
Not long before 3:35 pm on January 22, 2008, the short life and promising career of actor Heath Ledger came to a sudden, tragic end. It was around this time that Ledger's housekeeper and his masseuse discovered the body of the Australian-born actor in the bedroom of the Broome Street apartment he'd been renting in lower Manhattan. Ledger was not yet 29 years old.News of Ledger's death came as a terrible shock to nearly everyone, even though it now seems the low-key, Oscar-nominated actor had been privately battling his own demons for quite some time. His passing is the terrible surprise ending no one saw coming, an abrupt finale to a life and career that seemed to be all about the unexpected.Born and raised in Perth, Australia, and named after the darkly romantic anti-hero from Wuthering Heights (he has a sister named Katherine), Ledger left school at the age of 17 to pursue a career in acting. He eventually landed a role in Blackrock, a small independent feature about teen rape, fo...
read more
Question: A long time ago I read something about a lawsuit and some kind of a fake critic — what was it about and was there a resolution?
Answer: The legal case you remember was a class-action suit filed in 2001 by two disgruntled California moviegoers who claimed that ads featuring glowing quotes by "David Manning" of The Ridgefield Press enticed them to see A Knight's Tale under false pretenses. Leaving aside the fact that I think moviegoers who rely on quote ads to make viewing decisions are on a par with diners who let TV commercials suggest where they should eat, the suit turned up the fact that there was no David Manning. Although there is a small Connecticut newspaper called The Ridgefield Press, two advertising executives at Sony Pictures invented critic David Manning out of whole cloth. That also amazes me, given that the field of movie reviewing is
read more
