Word: depp
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sure, a figure bearing Depp's name runs, occasionally roughshod, through the tabloid life of our times. This guy is best known to the general public for trashing a hotel room a couple of years ago and getting busted for it, for his long-running liaison with supersvelte supermodel Kate Moss and for his proprietorship of the menacingly named Viper Room, the determinedly grungy rock club on Sunset Blvd. outside of which River Phoenix succumbed to a final overdose. What the public does not know is that this character is largely the figment of our gossip-debased collective unconscious...
...certain cultural laziness compounds this misapprehension. It's much easier to write Depp off as just another "actor boy," seeming to strike those inarticulately nihilistic poses that are the type's trademark, than it is to come seriously to grips with his astonishingly rangy body of work. Or even to catch it, since this Florida high school dropout, failed rocker and totally instinctive actor tends to work cult country, where a film's theatrical life-span can be nasty, brutal and short, but where these days the more interesting directors and writers hang...
...auteur hag," says his friend director John Waters, and Depp's longtime agent, Tracey Jacobs, agrees. "It all starts with the screenplay," she says, "not the bottom line. Then he chooses directors and actors he likes." Among them--twice, including Depp's upcoming directorial debut, The Brave--is Marlon Brando, another instinctive actor, who almost certainly would have preferred a hide-in-plain-sight career like Depp's to the one he got. Depp, now 33, was lucky. He was given his shot at mainstream studdishness early on and blew it off fast. That was after he scored his first...
...fully hardened. "I told him if he did Cry-Baby, we'd kill that image," he says. "So he parodied himself by playing a teen idol, and it totally worked." Then Tim Burton gave him the opportunity to bury it for good with Edward Scissorhands, in which Depp played an abandoned monster with cutlery where his digits should have been, trying with sweetly contained but (considering his weaponry) dangerous eagerness to adjust to suburban normalcy. Everyone from moony adolescents to case-hardened movie critics could read the silent, yet somehow unsentimental, plea for succor emanating from his deep obsidian eyes...
...revelation--perhaps not least to Depp. The success of the film (his only commercial hit) showed that it was possible to subvert stardom's conventional wisdom, which insists that an actor must assert at least some aspect of his nature that the audience can identify and cling to as he moves from picture to picture. Scissorhands proved to Depp that he could work in his own way. "He transforms himself into the character," says Badham. "He's not going to do what some actors do, and transform the character into themselves...