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Johnny Depp’s fall f-rom heart-throb to ‘hobo’

HE was the last great Gen X icon, a movie star for the 1990s: disaffected, striking, weird.

His beauty was original — he looked like no one else, instantaneously generational. He dated Winona Ryder and Kate Moss at the height of their careers.

He turned down roles that made stars of Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves and Tom Cruise, never looking back, never expressing regret.

He preferred to play freaks and outcasts in movies that made little money — Cry-Baby, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, Edward Scissorhands — and those risks earned him the respect of his peers.

Marlon Brando, Bob Dylan, Hunter S Thompson, Keith Ric-hards — all befriended him.

“He’s got other young actors imitating his career,” director John Waters told Timemagazine in 1997. “I actually hear people say, ‘I want to do a Johnny Depp.’ He’s real. He plays heroes in an uncorny way.”

Depp exuded a rare combination of danger and fragility, and both felt authentic, The New York Post reports. He spoke of dark experiences with drugs, ­alcohol and his own temper, yet would rhapsodise about “playing Barbies” with his little girl. He quietly visited sick kids in hospitals, dressing as his most famous c-haracter, Captain Jack Sparrow f-rom Pirates of the Caribbean.

He was, in short, the coolest. And then, less than two weeks ago, Depp became a pariah, accused by his estranged wife, Amber Heard, of domestic violence. That was followed by a wave of photos and text messages seeming to support her claims.

Last week, a judge granted Heard a restraining order against Depp. Heard filed for divorce on May 23, just three days after Depp’s mother died.

Heard’s allegations may seem shocking, at odds with Depp’s hard-won makeover into a family-friendly Disney star. But a look back reveals a long history of booze, drugs and violence.

Depp, now 52, seems to have gone off the rails in 2012, the year he split f-rom Vanessa Paradis, mother of their two children. He then married Heard, a blond starlet 22 years his junior, and renewed his friendship with decadent rock star Marilyn Manson.

Then came the public appearances: stumbling and slurring his words, most notably while presenting at 2014’s Hollywood Film Awards. Forbes magazine ranked him the most overpaid actor of 2015. He began showing up on red carpets in poor hygiene, displaying rotten, bloody teeth.

What happened to Johnny Depp?

Depp was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, on June 9, 1963. His mum was a waitress and his dad, who left when Depp was 15, was a civil engineer. He has said that his family moved at least 20 times and that his childhood was rough.

“It was a relatively violent upbringing,” he told Rolling Stone in 2013. “If you did something wrong, you got hit. If you didn’t do something wrong, you got hit. But my parents, they did the best they could with what they knew.”

He has said that by 14, he had tried “every kind of drug there was.” He was also, he said, a cutter, wounding himself to feel physical rather than emotional pain.

Depp d-ropped out of high school at 16, joined a band called The Kids, and moved out to Los Angeles to become a rock star. A mutual friend introduced Depp to Nicolas Cage, and Depp fell into acting. In 1987, he won the lead role on Fox’s 21 Jump Street, a drama about baby-faced undercover cops infiltrating high schools to bust kids for drugs.

It turned Depp into an instant teen idol, and he hated everything about it. “I don’t want to be … some spokesman for ‘Just Say No to Drugs’,” he told Movielinemagazine in 1990. “I’m just as f**ked up as the next guy.”

After Fox refused to let him out of his contract, Movieline ­reported that Depp had become “an ego monster” on set and “has set fire to his underwear, been deliberately belligerent to producers, and even thrown them a punch or two.”

It all only burnished Depp’s rebellious image, and when he took the lead role in John Waters’ 1990 film, Cry-Baby — sending up his heart-throb image under the filthiest American director ever — it cemented Depp’s status as both insider and outsider.

He next starred as the titular lead in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands and got engaged to his co-star, Winona Ryder, tattooing “Winona Forever” on his right arm. When they began dating, she was 18 to his 26.

Depp was rich, famous and in love, but the rage was still there — along with his insistence that his hard-partying days were ­behind him.

“I’ve got a bit of a temper,” he told Rolling Stone in 1991, adding that he was sorry about his “younger, hellion, hitting-the-sauce-hard kind of days.”

Ryder and Depp split in 1993 without marrying. He began filming What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? and by all accounts was horrible to work with, reportedly bullying his co-star, a teenage Leonardo DiCaprio, into eating a rotten egg. “I tortured him,” Depp admitted to Us Weekly in February. “I really did.”

At the time, he copped to rampant self-abuse on set. “I was poisoning myself beyond belief,” he told Vanity Fair in 1997. “There was a lot of liquor. A lot of liquor.”

He was asked whether he had been using heroin at the time.

“Oh, let’s not talk about that,” Depp said. “It was a very sad time for me.”

In October 1993, the actor River Phoenix died at age 23 of a drug overdose outside Depp’s LA nightclub, The Viper Room. Phoenix had been partying inside with other young celebs. Depp denied his club was a drug den and blamed the media for linking Phoenix’s overdose to him.

“They made it into a fiasco of lies to sell f**king magazines,” Depp told Playboy in 1996. “They said he was doing drugs in my club, that I allow people to do drugs in my club. What a ridiculous f**king thought!”

By 1994, Depp was with Kate Moss, the waifish supermodel who gave rise to “heroin chic.” A copious drinker, she was nicknamed “The Tank.” Depp had his tattoo al-tered to read “Wino Forever,” and in 1994, while staying with Moss at The Mark Hotel in Manhattan, Depp was arrested for trashing their room, causing $US9767.12 ($13,255) in damages.

The next night, Depp made headlines after a bar fight in the East Village. “It didn’t take long for Johnny Depp-lorable to show his wild side again,” read the copy, reporting the actor “allegedly sparked a fight” after slamming into a patron and saying, “F**k you.” (Depp denied it.)

In 1998, after four years together, Depp split with Moss and quickly rebounded with French actress/pop star Vanessa Paradis. Three months later, Paradis was pregnant, and thus began the reinvention of Johnny Depp: f-rom Hollywood hellraiser to rehabbed family man, tamed by his new love and new family, tucked away in the French countryside.

In interviews throughout the years, Depp has stuck to familiar themes: his rage and his issues with drugs and alcohol.

On attacking paparazzi in London in 1998 with a piece of wood: “The beauty, the poetry of the fear in their eyes, in these filthy little maggots’ faces, was so worth it. I didn’t mind ­going to jail for, what, five, six hours?” (Premiere magazine, 1999)

“I mean, I drink, so I still have that form of escape. But … you realise that you’re hurting the people around you, and you’re scaring the people around you.” (The Guard­ian, 2001)

“I was just kind of pickling myself over a period of years.” (GQ, 2003)

“At a certain point [friends and family] intervened. At the time, I said I appreciated it. I went through the motions.” (Playboy, 2004)

“I still have … the hillbilly rage, as it’s been called. I may even break a television set here and there; it just doesn’t get written about, because I’m not doing it in a hotel.” (The Guardian, 2006)

In 2011, the writer Nick ­Tosches, a friend of Depp’s, profiled him for Vanity Fair. They met at Depp’s rented manor in London, drinking wine and smoking cigarettes late into the night. At some point, Depp disappeared, and Tosches later found him “dead-out asleep in the toilet.”

Two years later, Depp showed up for a Rolling Stone interview “dressed like a hobo other hobos would worry about.” Depp, who has an estimated net worth of $US400 million, wore shredded jeans held together with duct tape and a torn fedora. He drank a non-alcoholic beer and said he hadn’t touched alcohol in 18 months.

Depp’s narrative wasn’t supposed to go like this. He had the perfect arc: bad boy reformed by true love, the Hollywood rebel who became a megastar on his own terms.

Something seemed to break in him, though, after the wild success of the first Piratesmovie in 2003. It grossed $US654 million worldwide and put Depp back right whe-re he began: beholden to a major studio, a product, a living embodiment of a theme ride.

Over the past several years, Depp’s eccentricities, once so endearing, have curdled into something creepy. Audiences became exhausted with his wigs-and-makeup routine, and his most ­recent films — 2010’s The Tourist, 2013’s The Lone Ranger, last year’s Mortdecai and last month’s Alice Through the Looking Glass — have been flops.

His one professional bright spot: critical raves for his role as the gangster Whitey Bulger in 2015’s Black Mass. Yet he did not get an Oscar nomination, and the co-star he’d once tormented, Leonardo DiCaprio, won for The Revenant.

Meanwhile, as public sentiment swings to Heard’s side, Depp has been partying in Europe. Last week, he was photographed nearly getting into a fight outside a bar in Denmark at 2.30am. An advocacy group called Women’s Aid has called for Depp to be d-ropped f-rom Dior’s poorly named “Sauvage” campaign.

Depp himself has yet to issue comment on Heard’s claims, but three years ago, he told Rolling Stone that when stressed, he most often hears Marlon Brando’s voice in his head, giving him this advice: “F**k it. F**k it. You don’t need this s**t. F**k it.”

“Marlon got to a point in his life whe-re he just said, ‘I don’t care’,” Depp said. “And that must be some species of nirvana. It has to be. It’s freedom.”

This story originally appeared in The New York Post.

Author: News Australia

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