Why are people so obsessed with Johnny Depp?
A career in which he only seemed to like when he was a pirate and a love history that exploded with a complaint from Amber Heard. We investigate the end of the most famous scoundrel in Hollywood.
"She grabbed the phone like I was a baseball pitcher and threw it in my face," Heard says.
On August 16, a brief statement ended the marriage between John Christopher Depp II (Kentucky, 1963) and Amber Laura Heard (Texas, 1986) and, with it, the penultimate great Hollywood scandal, which broke out on May 27. That day, at the gates of the Los Angeles courthouse, the end of the classic fairy tale was staged: Amber Heard not only asked for a divorce from Johnny Depp but, with a black eye and a split lip, demanded a restraining order claiming : "Throughout our relationship, Johnny Depp has abused me physically and verbally."
Hollywood couldn't believe what was happening. As if it were Jack Sparrow strolling along the greater cock of the Black Pearl, few like Johnny Depp had managed to balance their public and private lives. In his 30-year career, Depp had had a mistress in every port, and each and every one spoke highly of him. Until that unfortunate May 27th.
The actor first married Lori Anne Allison. She was 25 years old; he, 20. He dreamed of being a singer; her, makeup artist. Together they left Florida in search of the Californian dream. Two years later, a star had been born and a married couple had died. For Nigel Goodall, author of up to three biographies of Johnny Depp (and one of Winona Ryder), this first love "was an attempt by Johnny to fix what had not worked between his parents."
It didn't take long for Depp to fall in love with another woman (s): first with his partner at the Loft Studio Acting Academy, Sherilyn Fenn, David Lynch's haunting muse on Twin Peaks. After Jennifer Gray, the Baby from Dirty Dancing. She asked both of them to marry her. Goodall says that in Hollywood stickers were sold that read: "Honk if Johnny Depp has not proposed to you!". His great love, however, was yet to come.
Johnny Depp met Winona Ryder at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York, at the premiere of Big Fireball. He was a 17-year-old teenager and Johnny, at 26, an aspiring woman. After two months they were already dating. At five, on February 26, 1990, they were engaged. On the screen they starred in the great fable for rare children: Eduardo Scissors, by Tim Burton; Outside of it, they became the incarnation of the so-called “Generation X”, those boys born in the 70s who with their grunge music would constitute the most important youth movement since punk.
For Tara Brabazon, author of the study From revolution to revelation: Generation X, popular memory and cultural stories: “Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder were the James Dean and Natalie Wood of Generation X. Although they did not die in tragic circumstances, they did live in circumstances tragic and showed the inability of his generation to handle in adult relationships. On June 21, 1993, the magic built on beatniks' verses breaks from photographing her so much: her agents announce the end of their relationship. She locks herself in a hotel; he has a flirtation with Juliette Lewis, his partner in Who Does Gilbert Grape Love ?. Louise Krasniewicz, anthropologist and author along with Michael Biltz of Johnny Depp: a biography, maintains that their breakup was exaggerated: “It is not that it was not traumatic, but to a large extent it also had part of the staging that their Hollywood image demanded of them in that moment".
Everything would get worse: on October 30, 1993, River Phoenix died of an overdose on the doorstep of The Viper Room, owned by Depp. "Gen X" discovered, to their horror, that life was blacker than their Nirvana sweatshirts. But Depp wasn't going to stay to check.
Gala evening of the CFDA Awards, given by the Fashion Designers Association, on a cold January 1994 in New York. Kate Moss goes into a cafe to buy tobacco and there he is. Depp will reproduce with Moss his relationship with Winona: again a decade younger than him. Again the girl of the moment. Thanks to Calvin Klein, Moss personifies the canon of beauty of those years: squalid and ramshackle, she will popularize what was dubbed "heroin chic." For Depp, Moss is her ticket to London: from the embers of grunge to the bonfire of britpop. If Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg were the kings of Swinging London in their sixties, Johnny and Kate are the kings of Tony Blair's Cool Britain. Through Moss he meets Ewan McGregor, Jude Law, the Gallagher brothers… His is the slide guitar that sounds in the Oasis song Fade In-Out. These are days of wine and roses. On the shoulder where Johnny had tattooed "Winona forever" (Winona forever) now reads "Wino Forever" (drunk forever) "and Kate is nicknamed The Tank (The tank), for her stamina drinking beer. They sleep on airplanes, they live in premieres, in discos, on the beaches, in the Viper Room ...
Hangovers are almost as bad as drunkenness. One of them, premonitory, costs him the dungeon. Argues with Kate at The Mark Hotel in Manhattan on September 13, 1994. The police report reads: "$ 10,000 worth of damage," in a room that costs 2,200 a night. Her friend, director John Waters, who directed her on Cry Baby, declares, “Johnny invented grunge. He is handsome in handcuffs ”.
When, in mid-1997, their frantic life separates them, she thinks it will be something ephemeral. According to Laura Collins, a journalist for the Daily Mail and author of the biography Kate Moss: the complete picture, Kate does not believe she has lost him because "in four years, her sexual passion has never waned." She keeps thinking that she will return until she finds out that Vanessa Paradis is pregnant. Like Winona, after the anger comes depression, the days and weeks without getting out of bed and finally, the admission to the Priory clinic "due to exhaustion." In an interview in the American edition of Vanity Fair in 2012, Kate acknowledged her affliction in those days: “No one has ever been able to take care of me. Johnny did it for a while. […] I lost the support of someone I could trust. A nightmare. Years and years of tears. What I cried! ”.
Vanessa Paradis was also an icon. At the age of 19, thanks to her image of Lolita and the disturbing space between her upper incisors, Chanel had chosen her to rejuvenate her brand image. It is not difficult to guess what Johnny saw in her when the two met at the Hôtel Costes on Rue Saint Honoré. Obsessed with the literature of his country, Depp must have felt that American fascination for the Parisian, as a quintessential European and sophisticated, that had struck Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald. Vanessa Paradis' biographer Hugues Royer claims Depp was struck down by a daring open-back suit. Johnny and Vanessa are isolated in the countryside, far from Beverly Hills, far from the soirées.
With the same determination with which he has conquered him, Vanessa convinces him that he must accept more blockbusters and fewer indie quibbles. The first, the adaptation of a Disneyworld amusement ride called Pirates of the Caribbean, in 2003. To Depp's anthropologist and biologist Louise Krasniewicz: “The movie made him one of the biggest stars on the planet. It was everywhere, until it disappeared after the horrific fourth installment. " That was in 2011. By then, Vanessa Paradis's inner circle knew their relationship was over: Johnny was out at night again.
According to Nigel Goodall: “He couldn't get Amber out of his head after shooting The Rum Diaries. Amber must have felt the same way. " Amber Heard was Johnny's partner in the film. Two decades younger, she was beginning to be known for her roles in youth comedies like Welcome to Zombieland or Super Smoked. Also for his frankness: just a few months before he had decided to come out of the closet at a gala in defense of the rights of the gay community: “I do not label myself in any way: I have had satisfactory relationships with men and, now, with a woman (the photographer Tasya van Ree). I love who I love; what matters are the people ”.
Again, literary curse hovers over the actor's love life: In The Diaries… Johnny plays Paul Kemp, alter ego of his great friend the writer Hunter S. Thompson, who had committed suicide five years earlier. Johnny seems hell-bent on becoming one of Thompson's characters: self-destructive, nihilistic, night owl, quirky… Amber is the fit of his shoe: just as impulsive, just as vital, she loves indie movies, and she's allergic to that home life and landlady that Depp has had for 14 years with Vanessa. They argue often, but that is not an obstacle for them to decide to get married on the private island of Johnny Depp in the Bahamas, on February 3, 2015.
The press loves the new couple. During the filming in Australia of the fifth installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, the authorities denounce that Amber has tried to introduce her terriers without passing the mandatory quarantine. Her response to the commotion, known as "terriergate", is a video that is not known if it is a clumsy regret or a mockery of Australians. Heard becomes the most wanted character in women's magazines. Depp gets photographed at airports with Amber and her first-born, Lily Rose Depp. She gets tattooed on her knuckles "Slim" (skinny), the nickname of Heard. One year after his marriage, Johnny collects the Desert Palm honorary award with these words: “I have to thank my wife Amber for putting up with me, for living with all these characters, which is not easy. It's hard for me, and it has to be for him. "
We are in February 2016 and the news begins to spread the rumor that he is losing the oremus. What's wrong with Johnny? Peter Hanson, author of The cinema of Generation X points to a professional malaise: "The great success of Pirates ... and the failure of almost all his serious films has made him see that the public only enjoys his ability to embody colorful geeks"
Just as Depp opens Alice Through the Looking Glass, the fairy tale is shattered. On May 21, Johnny shows up at the hotel Heard has moved into after her latest row. He just buried his mother, Betty Sue. According to Heard's courtroom account, Depp "drunk and high," and in a fit of jealousy, asks him to call his friend, photographer and lesbian rights activist iO Tillett Wright. "He grabbed the phone like I was a baseball pitcher and threw it in my face," Heard says. Photographs of his bruised face are leaked. The judge rules that Johnny cannot be within 300 feet of Heard. The 450 million dollars in which his fortune is estimated are the subject of litigation. On August 16, the agreement is closed at seven million, which Heard will donate to humanitarian organizations. A tattoo, one more, definitely seals the relationship: on those knuckles where it read "Slim" (skinny), today it reads "scum" (garbage). A love thrown into the trash. We will see if the same thing happens with the career of the one who, until yesterday, was one of the great Hollywood stars.
