With Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Johnny Depp proves again he’s the Brando of his generation – BRIAN D. JOHNSON – July 22, 2005.
Depp is Hollywood’s rebel angel. And he’s lived a renegade life. Growing up in Florida, he dropped out of high school at 15, and became a garage-band rocker. After moving to Los Angeles and making his name as an actor, he turned into one of Hollywood’s legendary bad boys — linked to the drug-overdose death of River Phoenix in 1993, arrested for wrecking a Manhattan hotel room the following year, and scrapping with paparazzi outside a London restaurant in 1999. Since then, he’s settled down with singer-actress Vanessa Paradis in her native France and fathered two children.
It’s ironic that the kid who dropped out of school to do drugs and join the rock ‘n’ roll circus should stumble into A-list respectability by mimicking a heroin-chic Rolling Stone in a Disney movie. It was a risky choice, and one that initially alarmed his producers. But with his outrageous Keith Richards routine in Pirates of the Caribbean, Depp struck box-office gold.
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