Oscar Winners’ Surprising TV Starts: From Kate Winslet’s Sci-Fi Turn to Heath Ledger’s Soap Opera Days (PHOTOS)

Years before being honored with a posthumous win for his role as The Joker in 2008’s The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger played a gay cyclist on the Australian athletic drama Sweat (1996). One year later, he followed it up with a role as a hunky, blond-haired surfer on the long-running soap opera Home and Away (1997).