Sometimes a premature passing hits you hard. So it was for me, and I guess many thousands of others, with the sudden death of the actor Heath Ledger at 28. I did not know Ledger and my acquaintance with his work was limited to a single screen performance but his portrayal of Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain was so moving, so astonishingly mature, that it seemed the start of one of the truly great movie acting careers.

This wasn’t at all like watching James Dean, who never had a chance to grow up, in Rebel Without a Cause. This was marvelling at a 25-year-old charting the course of a many-chaptered life, from prudish inexperience through passion, marriage, fatherhood and a strange kind of accepting calm. I’m not sure there has ever been anything quite like it. The comparison that comes to my mind is not James Dean but Franz Schubert. Ang Lee himself, in a most affecting tribute, said that Ledger’s Ennis was “not just remarkable but a kind of miracle”. Working with Ledger had been one of the purest joys of his life – his death was “heartbreaking”, said Lee.