Heath Ledger's Legend

Just as the Joker was the year’s most talked-about movie character, Heath Ledger is now the most buzzed-about winner of Hollywood’s awards season.

Ledger’s posthumous Golden Globe win last night for Best Supporting Actor may help lock in a similar triumph at the Academy Awards. Oscar nominations will be announced Jan. 22, one year to the day since Ledger’s untimely death at age 28 from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs.

That following Friday, Jan. 23, Warner Bros. plans to re-release “Dark Knight” in both Imax and regular theaters.

The way Ledger made headlines since his death ran counter to how he’d recently resolved to live his life. In a 2006 interview with the Daily News, the laid-back kid from Perth, Australia, admitted to “not taking things seriously” when he found fame in “10 Things I Hate About You” (1999), “The Patriot” (2000) and “A Knight’s Tale” (2001).

After Ledger’s death in New York, toxicology reports found that a combination of drugs normally prescribed for insomnia, depression, pain, anxiety and cold symptoms had killed him. Rumors flew that burrowing so deeply into the Joker took a toll on his psyche, requiring a cocktail of drugs to calm his mind. In truth, Ledger’s longtime issues with insomnia seemed to be exacerbated by an undiagnosed case of pneumonia he’d developed filming “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” in London a month earlier.

As the year went on, and Ledger and “The Dark Knight” wound up on 10 Best lists, it seemed more and more inevitable.

Now the Globe win ups the ante. If Ledger gets an Oscar, he’ll be the first posthumous winner in a supporting category, and the first winner for a superhero movie.

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