di Johnny Depp is a world-renowned actor and we saw him play plenty of roles, but do we really know him? Are we sure that his biggest passion has always been acting?
John Cristopher Depp II, better known as Johnny Depp, was born on June 9 in Owensboro, a little city in Kentucky, to parents John Christopher More Senior and Betty Sue Depp. They were a big family, Johnny being the youngest of four children. The Depp family had Cherokee, German and Irish roots.
When he was little he had to move frequently for his father’s job. This brought him to attend several different schools preventing Johnny from making new friends and made him more interested in the testing of drugs than studying.
Since Johnny had always shown a big love for music, when he was 12, his mom gave him a guitar and soon he became a good guitarist . For him music was also a way of escaping from his family problems. In 1978, when he was just a 15 years old boy, his parents divorced and every week he had to go to his father’s office to pick up the child support money. This caused a break in the relationship between the boy and his father.
In 1980 he dropped out of school to join a band named The Kids. This group was becoming more and more famous in Florida so they decided to move to California looking for a recording contract which never arrived. So Johnny started to work as construction worker, mechanic and other jobs like those.
He was leading a normal life when, one lucky day in 1983, he got married to a famous make-up artist named Lori Ann Allison who introduced Johnny to Nicolas Cage, a famous actor and Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew, an year later. Cage, who saw great potential in this young man, brought him in Hollywood to an audition which Depp obtained as the main character in Nightmare on Elm Street. From that moment on his popularity started to grow.
In the years following his debut, Johnny was more and more requested as an actor, but the movies in which he starred weren’t so popular. That’s why the world didn’t know his wonderful style of acting when in 1990 he received an opportunity to exhibit his versatility as the protagonist of Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorshands.
Then Johnny went through a bad period: between drug problems and failed loves he fell in a deep depression for many years, but when in 1998 he finally got engaged to Vanessa Paradis, a French singer, who is his current fiancée, he found his smile again. Now, they have a son and a daughter. His career continued blooming and he played important leading roles in many famous movies like the thriller Sleepy Hollow (1999), the Man who Cried (2000), the comedy Chocolat (2000) and From Hell (2000) which was about the story of Jack the Ripper.
In 2000, Depp started a new collaboration with Walt Disney Studios, releasing the first film of Pirates of the Caribbean saga, The Curse of the Black Pearl, which gave great visibility to Johnny, turning him into a new idol for kids, teenagers and girls with his interpretation of Captain Jack Sparrow.
As a consequence, he acted in really good movies like Once Upon A Time In Mexico (2003), Secret Window (2004), and Finding Neverland (2004) and then he cooperated with Tim Burton again in 2005 for Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, taken from the homonymous book of Roald Dahl.
In 2006 and 2007 Johnny returned as Jack in the sequels of Pirates of the Caribbean, Dead Man’s Chest, in which we can discover the cursed fate of our dear Captain, and At World’s End where we can see the Black Pearl’s Crew landing at world’s end to find Sparrow. This two films got huge box office records.
Saying goodbye to Jack, our Johnny took on one of the theater’s most notorious character in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and in 2008 this brought Johnny his first Golden Globe as best actor in a movie comedy or musical after a great number of nomination.
In the next few years, Depp acted in movies like Public Enemies, Alice in Wonderland in which he played The Mad Hatter, The Tourist and the most recent chapter of Pirates of the Caribbean, On Stranger Tides, four completely different roles all played magnificently.
These were Johnny’s last films until 2011, but others are in preparation and his fans are growing more and more anxious to see what kind of surprises John has in store for them.
Once Tim Burton said that you can trasform Johnny as you need, you can give him all the parts you want because he will always be able to play them: he is not scared at all to look ugly on screen and this gives a director a great creative freedom. For this reasons and for his wonderful style acting he can be defined as an outstanding star.
CP
