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Title: Cooler Than You

Author: Stephen Dalton

Publication: UnCut

Issue: December 2004

FOR A WHILE back there, we almost lost Johnny Depp. Torn between success and excess, art and commerce, Hollywood’s Lost Boy could easily have coasted into a perpetual twilight of self-loathing like his friend and idol Marlon Brando. More likely still was a slow drift into art house exile in France. There were even moments when the darkness of River Phoenix or Kurt Cobain could have consumed him.

And yet, in 2004, Depp isn’t just back, he’s back on top. After countless flops punctuated by a couple of hits, the uncompromising 41 -year-old is currently basking in the glory of a sustained run of box-office smashes – first his Oscar-nominated turn as buccaneer Jack Sparrow in the theme-park swashbuckler Pirates Of The Caribbean then running away with Robert Rodriguez’s splatterpunk “taco western” Once Upon A Time In Mexico, and now his sensitive portrayal of Peter Pan creator JM Barrie in Finding Neverland, from Monsters Ball director Marc Forster. After years playing emotionally scarred fuck-ups, drug addicts, freaks and outcasts, the Lost Boy has come in from the cold.

GLIDING THROUGH the ballroom of Venice’s Des Bains hotel to meet Uncut, Depp radiates the serenity of a man with nothing left to prove. In his dreamy, faraway voice, he talks about Barrie.

“It’s important to keep in contact with those qualities we had as children,”

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Title: Johnny’s Depth

Publication: People Magazine

Issue: November 2004

Johnny Depp was having his very own take-your-daughter-to-work day. For months he had been commuting from the set of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory near London to see his fami­ly—Lily-Rose, 5, Jack, 2, and their mom, his longtime companion, Vanessa Paradis, 31—at their retreat on the French Riviera. Every weekend was the same, says producer Richard Zanuck: On Friday after work Depp took a two-hour flight to Nice followed by a two-hour drive to the family house in a tiny French village, then headed back to London again every Sunday night. The trip never wore him out. “Monday morning he’d be all smiles and say, ‘I just had the greatest time with my family’” says Zanuck. “It seemed to refresh him.” But he brought the family to England for the last month of shooting. And nothing could quite compare to the charge he got bringing Lily-Rose to the set on Nov. 9. As Zanuck explains, “He wanted her to see him playing with the Oompa Loompas.”

Talk about perks. Less than a year after Hollywood’s sweetly scruffy outsider was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for the $654 million-grossing Pirates of the Ca­ribbean, Depp, 41, is once again riding high on a wave of good fortune. There’s Oscar buzz about his role as Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie in Finding Neverland. And there’s Depp’s deep contentment with family life— a life that now includes a recently purchased private island in the Caribbean where he can watch Paradis,

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Title: Heeere’s Johnny

Publication: Film Review

Issue: November 2004

It feels strange to call Johnny Depp a sex symbol. He may have starred as a man who thought he was the greatest lover m the world in Don Juan DaMarco but Depp is not known for playing the matinee idol. While the late 1980s TV show 21 Jump Street propelled him to pin-up status, Depp has been running away from the label ever since. From his cross dressing filmmaker in Ed Wood to his pill-popping journalist in Fear and Loathing In Los Vagas, Depp has chosen roles that do anything but elicit swoons from his female fans. Consider his gap-toothed swashbuckler in Pirates of the Caribbean – which last year brought him the biggest hit of his career, taking a whopping $305 million – and you will see what I mean.

Not that it`s stopped him regularly being voted one of Hollywood’s sexiest movie stars of all time. Maybe it`s that down-at-heel appearance of  his, but Johnny Depp doesn’t have to play hunks to come across as sexy. His teen-idol status was all in his off-screen behavior; from dating a string of high profile starlets, from Winona Ryder to Sherilyn Fenn to trashing hotel rooms, fighting with paparazzi and owning the infamous Viper Room club. Depp isrock’n’roll to the hilt – so much so, he even played slide-guitar on the Oasis track Fade In-Out.

These days, however,

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Title: The Innocents
Author: Kevin Jackson
Publication: Sight and Sounds
Issue: November 2004

Marc Forster’s unpredictable follow up to his critical success with Monster’s Ball (2001) is a biopic, of sorts, which purports to tell the story of how J.M. Barrie found his inspiration for Peter Pan in his deal­ings with the Llewelyn Davies family – the origi­nals for the Darlings in the play. Adapted by David Magee from a recent stage piece, The Man Who Was Peter Pan by Allen Knee. Finding Neverland is an unusually sober, tactful, thoughtful and thought prompting example of the genre; a rare example of a film aimed at the so-called family audience which will appeal most directly to the mature members of the family rather than the screaming tykes.

Like many other highly literate biopics -Lawrence of Arabia, for instance – it is also a pack of whoppers. Well established facts of chronology and geography are distorted, characters traduced or sim­ply invented, unwarranted speculations passed off as gospel truth. Does this matter? Not greatly, and while some pedantic Barrie fans will no doubt wax apoplectic, their ire will be misplaced. Some of the movie’s trifling’s with reality act mainly to stream line the plot and jerk a few additional tears: stan­dard dramatic license. The most important of them strengthen its ruling theme, which, to put it maybe a shade too pompously, is that of the origins and consolations of art: standard poetic license.

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Title: Playboy Interview: Johnny Depp

Publication: Playboy

Issue: May 2004

Johnny Depp has one of the quirkiest resumes in Hollywood. After starting his career as a TV heartthrob, he reinvented himself as a serious actor in offbeat and usually brutally uncommercial movies: He was critically ac­claimed box office poison. But now, thanks to his role in last year’s $300 million-grossing smash Pirates of the Caribbean—a big, goofy Disney family film that is the antithesis of Depp’s indie work—he has at last emerged as a mainstream star. He notched his first Oscar nomination. People magazine dubbed him the sexiest man alive for 2003, even as he turned 40. And the actor with a penchant for getting in trouble—and landing in jail—has been replaced by a kinder, mellower Depp, a family man who has given up drinking and drugging in favor of days in the park with his kids. Who the hell is this guy anyway?

Depp’s early days are well documented. As an undercover cop on 21 Jump Street, he emerged as an instant teen idol in 1987. But a future as a lunch box icon scared him, and he quickly fled to movies. He turned down star-making parts that later went to Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves and Brad Pitt, but he found a niche playing idiosyncratic misfits. He became a muse for director Tim Burton, who first cast him in the title role of Edward Scissorhands and later in Ed Wood and Sleepy Hollow.

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Title: The Sexiest Man Alive…Johnny Depp

Author: Lisa Russell

Publication: PEOPLE

Issue: December 1, 2003

There he was in Disneyland last summer, strolling through the park with his girlfriend and their two children. They were any family: the 4-year-old girl with her face buried in a cloud of cotton candy, the 20-month-old boy asleep in a stroller. But onlookers who caught a glimpse of the drop-dead features beneath the slouchy hat and dark glasses probably did a double take. The family guy was Johnny Depp, out introducing his kids to Pirates of the

Caribbean, the theme-park ride that inspired the year’s biggest nonanimated blockbuster and catapulted his art-house career into the bright, shiny mainstream. After spending a lifetime rebelling against the Man, Depp has been tamed, at 40, by the Mouse.

Say hello to the new Johnny Depp, this year’s Sexiest Man Alive. Once infamous for his brooding eccentricities, he has mellowed. Prior to  parenthood, “I just wasted a whole bunch of time.” he declared recently. And because he arrived at his new happy place without selling out, without becoming slick or packaged or politically correct, he is a hero to his fans and an idol to his young costars. “Lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely” says Keira Knightley, his castmate in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. “He’s very cool. He’s a gorgeous guy. Eye candy.”

Settled in a medieval-style house in L.A.

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Title: Johnny depp

Publication: PEOPLE

Issue: May 14, 2001

ACTOR Onetime teen idol Johnny Depp has gone out of his way to lose the dreamboat label. He keeps his hair long and lank, wears ratty clothes and has made his body what he calls a “journal of skin” by acquiring mul­tiple tattoos—including one that says “Wino Forever,” amended after his 1993 breakup with fiancee Winona Ryder. “I jot down life experiences that mean something to me— jot them down permanently.” Depp. 37. told The New York Times last month. The tattoos “just add to his whole gypsy mystique.” says Ted Demme, director of Depp’s latest film, Blow. “He looks like he’s on the outside, like he’s doing what he wants.”

Demme’s right on both counts. The Kentucky-born actor has been snubbing Holly­wood since his 1998 move to France, where he shares a Paris apartment and a farm­house near Saint-Tropez with actress-singer Vanessa Paradis, 28, and their daughter Lily-Rose, who turns 2 this month. Depp doesn’t work the red carpet on award nights, nor does he routinely hype his films on the talk show circuit. Yet the parts—and the plaudits—keep coming.

In the past year Depp has played two bohernian roles, in the historical drama The Man Who Cried and in the Oscar-nominated fable Choco­lat. That film’s director, Lasse Hallstrom, says the part of Roux, the Irish wanderer who woos Juliette Binoche’s Vianne, was “a perfect fit”

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Title: Village of the Damned!

Author: Simon Braud

Publication: Empire

Issue: January 2000

AFTER TREKKING UP THE MUDDIEST FOREST TRACK in the entire history of mud (and, no doubt, tracks), Empire finally crests a densely wooded hill to be met with an arresting and slightly unsettling sight: occupying a clearing in the trees some 300 meters below is a tiny, perfectly formed 18th century village which appears to be under attack from alien spacecraft. Hovering above the spiky church, ramshackle half-timbered cottages and suspiciously bijou bridge is a collection of vast, incandescent slabs which are bathing the settlement below in a pale and unearthly light. It looks like the type of tableau you might find gracing the interior of an enormously expensive snow globe.

What is also rather eerie is that earlier in the day Empire inspected exactly the same scene, complete with glowing monoliths, meticulously rendered in miniature in a model shop at Leavesden Studios. And to add a further prickle of unease, as we set off down the mercifully less soggy path that leads to the cluster of buildings below, it occurs to us that this Is precisely how New York constable lchabod Crane first enters the Hudson Valley hamlet of Sleepy Hollow to investigate a series of grisly murders. And it’s here that he first encounters the local legend of the headless horseman.

THERE’S NO CAUSE FOR ALARM, OF COURSE.

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