Today, Johnny Depp becomes sexagenarian. The actor, filmmaker and musician, who has just premiered a bodrio at the Cannes Film Festival and fractured an ankle, which will postpone some performances with his live band, has been the center of attention, too, for reasons that go beyond the artistic.
His high-profile trial with his ex-wife, actress Amber Heard, was a year ago. Accused of beating and abuser, the Aquaman singer lost in the trial, and Depp, a few days later, was already on stage, playing guitar with Jeff Beck, the musician who died in January of this year.
Everyone will have their favorite movie. There will be those who remember him as Jack Sparrow, the protagonist of the Pirates of the Caribbean saga, based on the Disney amusement park game, a role for which he said he was inspired by Keith Richards, the guitarist of the Rolling Stones.
Like Jack Sparrow, one of the most famous pirates in the world of cinema.
Others preferred it when it was directed by his friend Tim Burton. Here, the films are already many, but his portrayal of Z-class filmmaker Ed Wood in Burton's eponymous film must be among the best he's ever done in his entire career.
A career that has cairns, many from the hand of who directed it in The Young Scissorhands, Sweeney Todd, The legend of the Headless Horseman, was Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Alice in Wonderland, to name a few.
Victim of Freddy Krueger
His debut as an actor did not have him on television, a medium that he practically did not frequent, but in the cinema. He was Glen Lantz, one of Freddy Krueger's first victims in Wes Craven's first Nightmare in the Deep of the Night (1984). Then Oliver Stone called him to be one of the soldiers in Vietnam Platoon, the Oscar winner. John Waters did it, but to star in Cry-Baby, as the bad boy, but with a heart of gold, of Baltimore.
With Traci Lords in "Cry Baby" (1990).
In Who Does Gilbert Staplee Love? it was Gilbert Grape, next to a very young Leonardo DiCaprio. And more titles would come in which he would embody the character of the title, such as Don Juan de Marco -next to Marlon Brando- and Donnie Brasco, with Al Pacino.
With the Oscar he flirted once again, in 2004, when he was nominated for best leading actor for Discovering Neverland, by Marc Forster, where he played Sir James Matthew Barry, the creator of Peter Pan, alongside Kate Winslet. A year earlier it had been for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and in 2008 it would be for the third and last time by Sweeney Todd.
For "Discovering Neverland" he earned one of his three Oscar nominations.
And he co-starred with Juliette Binoche in the nominee Chocolate, by Lasse Hallström.
He had his pifiadas, as in The Tourist, next to Angelina Jolie, and was not bad at all in the much criticized The Lone Ranger, where he played Tonto, the indigenous who accompanied the protagonist.
Lately, and due to the complaints of Amber Heard, he had been practically without having to answer the cell phone, because the producers did not call him. He was as Grindelwald in the first two of Fantastic Beasts (well, it was almost a cameo in the first), but Warner Bros. decided to fire him from the third and pay him the five million of his contract and replace him with Mads Mikkelsen.
He played Willy Wonka in his friend Tim Burton's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."
Recently passing through the Cannes Film Festival, where he accompanied the opening film, Jeanne du Barry, where he is King Louis XV, it seems that it was there where he had his ankle injury, and will take him away from the performances he had planned with his superband Hollywood Vampires, which integrates with Alice Cooper and Joe Perry, of Aerosmith. They were going to play these days, right around his birthday, on a tour of the United States.
It was there, in Cannes, in his first contact with the international press in years, when he referred to the boycott he suffered from Hollywood, after the denunciations of his ex.
Depp spoke in Cannes of Hollywood's boycott of him. Photo Reuters
"If I felt boycotted by Hollywood? You'd have to have no pulse to feel like, 'No, none of this is happening. It's a weird joke.' When you're asked to give up a movie you're making for something that's just a function of vowels and consonants floating in the air, you do feel boycotted," he said.
Depp took advantage of his trip to the Côte d'Azur to, the day after the presentation of Jeanne du Barry, go down to the Marché du filme, the film market, in which productions that have not yet begun to be made are sold, in search of investors. Well, he wants to return to directing after 25 years of his last work as a filmmaker (The Warrior, with Marlon Brando).
His project is a film about the Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), which he produced with Al Pacino and Barry Navidi. And all those who want to put a dollar.
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