UK Premiere February 1995

Now you see Johnny Depp, now you don’t

 

Johnny Depp believes in ghosts. He has come to this haunted place looking for one in particular, a little girl wearing a silk party dress with a powder blue sash. She is often heard playing in the room across the hall from where Depp is sleeping in the Mackay Mansion, a three-story Victorian built high in the mountains of Nevada.

The small spirit likes the room. A cranberry glass chandelier casts spirals of ruby light upon shelf after shelf, each filled with antique French and German porcelain dolls. Side by side they sit, forty pairs of eyes staring toward the door, waiting for her.

Depp waits as well. “I want to run into some spirits here!” he says eagerly. When he isn’t gazing across the hall, he’s shooting Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man, a western set in the late 1800s, in which he finds his mug on a wanted poster. “When I was a kid I used to have these dreams,” says Depp. “But they weren’t dreams. I was awake, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. And a face would come to me.

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Premier, February 1995 – Ghost in the Machine

Title: Ghost in the Machine

Author: Holly Millea

Publication: Premier

Issue: February 1995

 

Photo2Johnny Depp believes in ghosts. He has come to this haunted place looking for one in particular, a little girl wearing a silk party dress with a powder blue sash. She is often heard playing in the room across the hall from where Depp is sleeping in the Mackay Mansion, a three-story Victorian built high in the mountains of Nevada. The small spirit likes the room. A cranberry glass chandelier casts spirals of ruby light upon shelf after shelf, each filled with an­tique French and German porcelain dolls. Side by side they sit, forty pairs of eyes staring toward the door, waiting for her.

Depp waits as well. “I want to run into some spirits here!” he says eagerly. When he isn’t gazing across the hall, he’s shooting Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man, a western set in the late 1800s, in which he finds his mug on a wanted poster. “When I was a kid I used to have these dreams,” says Depp. “But they weren’t dreams. I was awake, but I couldn’t move.

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UK The Face 1995

Let me be your fantasy

With roles as the world’s best lover and 

world’s worst film-maker, Johnny Depp has finally allowed his acting to take flight. He’s also secured his reputation as Hollywood’s sexiest man 

 

Ina few hours Johnny Depp will squirm beneath a vaulted ceiling in the guise of legendary makeout artist Don Juan surrounded by fountains, silken shrouds and a harem of 250 women. Two hundred and fifty naked women. He will want desperately to take each one aside and ask, “Are you OK with this? Are you comfortable shedding your clothes?”

So for right now, seated in a vinyl booth at the West Hollywood grunge cafe/billiard parlour Barney’s Beanery, he’ll do his darnedest to make life a little easier for a harried, apologetic waitress named Kelly. Kelly with obvious discomfort has just informed the bleary-eyed movie star the only coffee she can offer him is chocolate mint. “Sounds like a girl scout cookie,” he says. “Wild.” Kelly, shifting from foot to foot, has a look on her face that says, “You know Johnny, if it were up to me,

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The Face, 1995 – Let Me Be your Fantasy

Title: Let Me Be your Fantasy

Author: James Ryan

Publication: The Face

Issue: 1995

Photo1In a few hours Johnny Depp will squirm beneath a vaulted ceiling in the guise of legendary makeout artist Don Juan surrounded by fountains, silken shrouds and a harem of 250 women. Two hundred and fifty naked women. He will want desperately to take each one aside and ask, “Are you OK with this? Are you comfortable shedding your clothes?”

So for right now, seated in a vinyl booth at the West Hollywood grunge cafe/billiard parlour Barney’s Beanery, he’ll do his darnedest to make life a little easier for a harried, apologetic waitress named Kelly. Kelly with obvious discomfort has just informed the bleary-eyed movie star the only coffee she can offer him is chocolate mint. “Sounds like a girl scout cookie,” he says. “Wild.” Kelly, shifting from foot to foot, has a look on her face that says, “You know Johnny, if it were up to me, I’d run out to the supermarket myself…” Depp fixes his soulful doe eyes on hers and in his best nicotine voice soothes, “You know what,

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US Magazine February 1994

JOHNNY DEPP APPEARS TO BE IN A TRANCE. HIS EYES ARE GLAZED, registering something halfway between panic and pure bliss; his arms twitch in a kind of slow morion; his famously bowed lips are frozen in a secretive semi-smile. 

This is how Depp behaves when he’s really huppy. He is standing in his favorite store, the Heritage Book Shop, on Melrose Avenue, in Hollywood, sraring at a stack of letters – unpublished correspondence between two well-known writers (whose names Depp has requested be kept off the record in case he buys them) – on a desk. Moments before, Depp’s arrival caused a cheery flutter of greetings from the sraff, all of whom the actor knows byname. “This is where he gets into trouble,” says owner Lou Weinstein with a wink, 

The 30-year-old actor has been coming here since he arrived in LA. from Miramar, Fla.,some 10 years ago as a high school dropout who thought playing guitar in a rock & roll band was his destiny. “I didn’t have any money, but they were always nice to me,” he says. Though Depp prohably looks the same as he did back then -today he’s wearing chinos and a black jacket so frayed it gives new meaning to the word threads -now he can afford the pricey first editions and rare manuscripts that put him over the moon: He’s a movie star. 

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US, February 1994 – Johnny Depp

Title: Johnny Depp

Author: Leslie Van Buskirk

Publication: US

Issue: February 1994

 

Photo1JOHNNY DEPP APPEARS TO BE IN A TRANCE. HIS EYES ARE GLAZED, registering something halfway between panic and pure bliss; his arms twitch in a kind of slow motion; his famously bowed lips are frozen in a secretive semi-smile.

This is how Depp behaves when he’s really happy. He is standing in his favorite store, the Heritage Book Shop, on Melrose Avenue, in Hollywood, staring at a stack of letters — unpublished correspon­dence between two well-known writers (whose names Depp has requested be kept off the record in case he buys them) — on a desk. Moments before, Depp’s arrival caused a cheery flutter of greetings from the staff, all of whom the actor knows by name. “This is where he gets into trouble,” says owner Lou Weinstein with a wink.

The 30-ycar-old actor has been coming here since he arrived in L.A. from Miramar, Fla., some 10 years ago as a high school dropout who thought playing guitar in a rock and roll band was his destiny. “I didn’t have any money,

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UK Sky 02 / 1991

Johnny Deeper

Michael Jackson was interested in the part. So was Tom Cruise. But the title role in Edward Scissorhands went to former teen-idol Johnny Depp. Described by one movie director as  “he best looking gas-station attendant who ever lived”, Depp looks set to finally shed his pretty boy image an emerge as a serious actor. Bill Zehme met him in LA….

Johnny Depp is his real name. As a boy he was ridiculed for it. In the schoolyard he was called Dipp. Or Deppity Dawg. Later he was called Johnny Deeper, this being based upon a popular adolescent joke he barely remembers:

“Something about some guy having sex with some girl who kept saying, ‘Johnny, deeper!’”

The day we meet he extends his hand to shake mine, except that his hand is more like a piece of weaponry. In place of fingers there are blades. We are on a Twentieth Century Fox sound stage where he is making Edward Scissorhands, his second major film,

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US – The Face July 1991

The other half of Hollywood’s hippest couple, Johnny Depp is better known here as Winona Ryder’s boyfriend. Now with Edward Scissorhands, their first film together, he also shows he can act: but its not a pretty sight…

“My lips are so fucked.” Johnny Depp groans and reaches for some vitamin E cream. He’s right. His pretty-boy pout is in trouble. Dry and cracked, burnt red raw in places. The result of another day’s work in the boiling hot 100-degree entre of nowheresville, Arizona. Depp’s here to shoot The Arrowtooth Waltz, a magically off-beat coming-of-age comedy which also stars Jerry Lewis and Faye Dunaway, and the first American film by Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica of Time Of The Gypsies fame. The last outpost of civilsation – a one-laundromat, two-street town called Patagonia – is an hour’s drive away. Along with his blasted lips, it’s another indication of just how far Johnny Depp will got leave behind the heart-throb image given to him by the US TV cop show 21 Jump Street.

In last year’s Cry Baby, he let John Waters have his wicked way with him. In Tim Burton’s upcomingEdward Scissorhands,

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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Premiere

CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF THE DEPP KIND

I had begun working in NYC in early May while on break from school. Well 3 of my close friends happened to be in the city on the day of the Fear and Loathing premiere, although I had no idea it was going on. Well they got wind of it mid-day and hurried down (camera in hand) to capture the whole thing for me.

My friend Jesse, a sometimes over zealous fellow, somehow got into the press box at the premiere. He said that it had been getting late and he thought that maybe Johnny wasn’t coming. However, out from the last limo to arrive, stepped Johnny himself.

I will now tell the story as Jesse told it to me:

Johnny stepped from the limo wearing a dark suit and the appropriate dark sunglasses and began to walk the red carpet. By now the photographers and on-lookers were whipped up into a frenzied excitement. Jesse said that people were climbing all over each other, shouting his name. Jesse, who is usually calm, said that at this point even he was star struck. I guess he was swept up in the moment or something but he became obsessed with getting Johnny’s attention.

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SKY, June 1990 – Baby Face

Title: Baby Face

Author: Tony Fletcher

Publication: SKY

Issue: June 1990

 

Photo1At the top of Johnny Depp’s lean and muscu­lar right arm, above the fading tattoo of an Indian chief’s headdress, are two words that were etched into the actor’s skin for all eternity only months ago. They read “Winona Forever”. A public and permanent declaration of the 26-year-old’s love for his pregnant fiancée, actress Winona Ryder.

But if Depp hopes that the tattoo will per­suade his legion of young female followers to search elsewhere for a hero, he is mistaken. The previous evening, at the premiere in Balti­more of the new John Waters movie Cry Baby, a high-camp musical comedy in which Depp has the title role, the star was mobbed by hordes of screaming girls. Waters’ decision to base all his films in his home city of Baltimore has made him something of a local hero, but on this occasion it was Depp who stole the lime­light. Even the sight of Winona Ryder clinging happily to his arm failed to deter the teeny-boppers from screaming out their undying love for this high school dropout and failed rock musician.

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