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TimeOut - April 6-13, 2005 DEPP & MEANINGFUL
by Jessica Winter

He's bathed in champagne, bedded the world's most beautiful women, hung out with Hunter S. Thompson, and swung from art movie to blockbuster and back with aplomb. As the NFT begins a retrospective of his work, Jessica Winter looks back on the career of Johnny Depp, the most inscrutable of Hollywood stars.

Johnny Depp is the Robin Hood of modern cinema. He makes off with every film he's in -- coolly pockets it or swallows it whole, as the case may require -- and yet the intensity of subcutaneous commitment he brings to each role bespeaks a uniquely magnanimous craft. His CV is the least careerist and most unpredictable of moviedom's A-list: until recently, he spurned big-budget fare in favour of cockeyed comedies ("Ed Wood", "Benny and Joon"), Euro-arthouse curiosities ("Arizona Dream", "The Man Who Cried"), and underappreciated auteurist masterpieces ("Dead Man", "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas").

By the turn of the '90s, Depp entered the blockbuster realm without sacrificing his integrity or his idiosyncrasies. For his first $100 million grosser, Tim Burton's "Sleepy Hollow" (1999), he embodied not fearless machismo but nebbishy squeamishness in the form of New York constable Ichabod Crane. ("We may have the first male action-adventure hero who acts like a 13-year-old girl," Burton proudly claimed at the time.) Four years later, in "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" (2003), Depp infused voluptuous wit and spry spontaneity into, of all things, a Jerry Bruckheimer production based on a Disney World ride. Resplendent in beaded dreadlocks and kohl, Captain Jack Sparrow evokes a trannie diva doing a spot-on Keith Richards impersonation, or vice-versa: a sublimely goofball alchemy that earned Depp his first Academy Award nomination.

With another Oscar nod to his credit (for last year's "Finding Neverland"), a "Pirates" sequel in the pipeline, and Tim Burton's keenly anticipated "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" out in July, Depp has become a beloved institution - a status reflected in this month's National Film Theatre season devoted to his selected works. "As far as I'm concerned," Terry Gilliam declared after the completion of "Fear and Loathing", "Johnny Depp is the best actor of his generation. I think he's capable of anything - there's no limit to his abilities... He doesn't cheat by giving you all these cheap emotions. He won't make you comfortable - for him that would be a foot in the grave." For his part, Depp has said: "I decided early on to be patient and wait for the roles that interested me, not the roles that would advance my career. I never wanted to be remembered for being a star."

Born in 1963 in Kentucky, Johnny Depp moved as a child to Miramar, a working-class south Florida town that he'd later compare to Endora, the stagnant nowheresville of "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" (1993). He left school early for Los Angeles, where he gigged with his band, The Kids, toiled in a few thankless McJobs, and landed an agent via his then-wife's ex-boyfriend, Nicolas Cage. Roles followed in "A Nightmare on Elm Street" (1984), wherein Depp is fatally sucked into a bed, and "Platoon" (1986), though much of his part ended up on the cutting-room floor; but he first leapt to stardom as teenybopper catnip on the US television series "21 Jump Street", an experience he openly loathed.

He made a deft escape from looming pin-up obsolescence in 1990 with a pair of eponymous roles: the pretty-boy delinquent in John Waters' '50s romp "Cry-Baby" and the sharp-fingered misfit in "Edward Scissorhands". "Cry-Baby" mocked and thereby neutralised his mass-produced "Tiger Beat" heartthrob image, while "Edward Scissorhands" - which marked the first of several collaborations with Tim Burton - can be read as a gothic metaphor for the overnight celebrity that left Depp feeling like an assembly-line freak. Shy and scarred, with a knotty bird's nest of hair, tricked out in kinky bondage gear and a clutter of blades for hands, Depp is the sweet soul of awkward elegance in Burton's whimsical "Frankenstein" redux, until Edward's suburban welcoming committee becomes an angry mob.

For much of his adult life, Depp has had to fend off rabble in the form of paparazzi, who obsessively documented his romances with Winona Rydeer and Kate Moss. (Moss was the other person in the room when, in 1994, the sometimes hot-tempered actor infamously trashed his Mark Hotel suite in New York; fellow guest Roger Daltrey told the management.) Depp deflected fame with vocational self-effacement: he was an aimless fish-counter in "Arizona Dream" (1993), a Chaplin-aping holy fool in "Benny and Joon" (1993), and, in "Gilbert Grape", a young man worn out by small-town monotony and the pressures of caring for his troubled family.

After turning down both "Speed" and "Interview with the Vampire", Depp starred in Tim Burton's best film so far, a twinkling highlight of the actor's resume. "Ed Wood" (1994) is a fond homage to the man widely acknowledged as the 'worst director ever', and a hilarious tribute to friendship, quixotic determination, and the relaxing properties of angora and pumps. Eyebrows arching in all directions, Depp's Wood is a chugging locomotive of faintly demented optimism and stick-to-it gumption. And like his character, Depp is a team player, leaving plenty of edible scenery for his castmates, including Bill Murray as the doleful yet queenly Burt Breckinridge and a spot-on Martin Landau as the aged Bela Lugosi. The cross-dressing Ed can almost always find good reason to flash his dentures, and every take is 'Perfect!'

Depp has played filmmaker for real just once, directing himself and his "Don Juan DeMarco" co-star Marlon Brando in the little-distributed "The Brave" (1997). The movie was poorly received, but Depp remains peerless as an auteur of audaciously stylised characterisations. Jim Jarmusch wrote "Dead Man" (1995), his monochrome, black-comic distillation of the western, specifically for Depp; he reciprocated with a fascinating un-performance as Cleveland accountant William Blake, who arrives in the Wild West outpost of Machine and promptly becomes an accidental outlaw. Neil Young's mantra-like guitar score tracks the odd couple's every step in Jarmusch's strange, beguiling (and cameo-rich) mix of searching mysticism and gallows humour. "Why I like Johnny so much as this character is that he starts off being such an innocent," Jarmusch once explained. "He's just so clean at the beginning that you want to graffiti all over him."

The same could never be said of the toxic twosome at the centre of Terry Gilliam's scandalously underrated "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (1998), an adaptation of the late Hunter S. Thompson's hallucinogenic epitaph for the '60s. Opposite the equally brilliant Benicio Del Toro (as the erudite yet frightening attorney-at-law), the never-better Depp is wild-eyed and liquid-limbed as Thompson's chemically-enhanced alter ego, the cigarette holder clenched between his teeth lending his voiceover a noirish command despite the oceans of drugs coursing through the character's veins. Always a conscientious researcher, Depp embraced the role by bunking down with Thompson at his Colorado compound: sleeping on the great man's couch, filing his correspondence, even wearing his clothes.

The tabloids once delighted in reporting - and exaggerating - Depp's outbursts of wild-man 'tude, manifested in occasional scuffles with cops and drunken disorderliness. But he's mellowed since finding domestic bliss with French singer-actress Vanessa Paradis and their two children, Lily-Rose, five and three-year-old Jack; the family split their time between Paris and the south of France. "When you're living in Hollywood all the time, you're constantly in that game, and you're susceptible to the pressures of success and the box office," Depp has said. "I couldn't stand it because I had no interest in that."

Depp of late has expressed an interest in films his kids can watch: hence "Pirates of the Caribbean", his turn as Peter Pan creator J.M. Barrie in "Finding Neverland", and his upcoming Willy Wonka interpretation. Given the regrettable Peter Pan complex of a certain surgically disfigured fallen pop idol who dwells on an estate called Neverland, and given the haunting familiarity of Depp's pageboy wig and pallid aspect in the "Chocolate Factory" trailers, could it be that the actor's latest source of inspiration is one Michael Jackson? Courage, thy name is Depp!

The Un-American: To German magazine Stern, Depp called America 'a big dumb puppy that has big teeth - that can bite and hurt you, aggressive.' On the American Dream, circa "Fear and Loathing" (1998): "It's hideous, a fucking monstrous nightmare. It's just a sack of blood. It's awful." Depp also lives in France, the unnamed fourth fiend on George W. Bush's Axis of Evil.

The body artist: Depp sports a dozen or so tattoos: the most famous, formerly a testament to his love for ex Winona Ryder, resides on his right upper arm and has since been amended to 'Wino forever'.

The bath taker: Early in their eventful courtship, Depp and then-steady Kate Moss supposedly bathed in champagne at the Portobello Hotel, a tale so firmly rooted in urban legend that the Portobello invokes it on its website. (In a party-pooper verson of the story, a maid drains the bubbly before the sweethearts have a chance to climb in.)

The bomb thrower: In a wee-hours bonding session with Hunter S. Thompson, Depp set off a propane-and-nitroglycerin bomb in the author's backyard - much to the consternation of the other guests, who included Kate Moss's mother.

The back talker: Depp's bachelor days officially came to an end the moment he first glimpsed Vanessa Paradis, sheathed in a back-revealing dress, in the lobby of the Hotel Costes in Paris. He told Rolling Stone: "Whammo, man, across the room, amazing, incredible, awesome. The Back, the Back, I saw the Back... And since the viewing of the Back, from that great distance, I've been another animal altogether."

The sommelier: While dining with Vanessa and some friends at Marco Pierre White's Mirabelle restaurant, Depp ran up a $17,000 bill, $11,000 of which was a single bottle of a rare 1978 vintage Romanee-Conti burgundy. "We were celebrating," he said.

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