Facts about Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp Biography
Before he was a big-time, eccentric movie star, Johnny Depp was famous as a heartthrob cop on the teenybopper drama 21 Jump Street (1987-1990).
He gave up TV for the movies, playing the fantastical title character in Tim Burton‘s Edward Scissorhands (1990) and winning critical acclaim in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993, co-starring Leonardo DiCaprio).
Depp became known as a handsome and thoughtful actor who craved variety; in the 1990s he took a wide range of roles, from the lead in Don Juan DeMarco (1995, with Faye Dunaway and Marlon Brando) to Ichabod Crane in Burton’s Sleepy Hollow (1999, with Christina Ricci).
In 2001 he played real-life cocaine trafficker George Jung in the movie Blow (co-starring with Penelope Cruz), and he became a box office superstar as the comically swaggering pirate Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (co-starring Orlando Bloom) and its sequels (2003-07).
The pirate role earned him an Oscar nomination in 2004, and he followed up with another nomination for playing J.M. Barrie (the creator of Peter Pan) in Finding Neverland (2004).
As if he hadn’t wowed audiences enough, Depp sang in Burton’s 2007 film Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and earned a third Oscar nomination for best actor.
By 2012 Depp was the highest paid movie star in the country, but then came a string of bad movies that did poorly at the box office. Even the fifth installment in the Pirates series, Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017) received a tepid response.
Off screen, Depp’s reputation was going in the same direction as his movie career, and headlines about him were more about domestic violence, drug abuse, weird behavior and the squandering of his fortune.
Depp’s acrimonious divorce from Amber Heard (they married in 2015 and divorced in 2017) led to a host of legal imbroglios that dominated news about him from 2016-2022.
Extra credit
Johnny Depp owns the Viper Room lounge in Los Angeles… He turned down the lead role in Speed (1994), which was then taken by Keanu Reeves… Pirates of the Caribbean was loosely based on the Disneyland thrill ride of the same name… Johnny Depp’s longtime companion was French pop singer and actress Vanessa Paradis. They began a relationship in 1998 that lasted until 2012, though they never married. They have two children together: daughter Lily-Rose Melody Depp (b. 1999) and son John Christopher Depp III (also known as Jack, b. 2002)… Johnny Depp sued The Sun in 2018 for defamation (they called him a wife beater) and lost in 2020. Depp then sued Heard for defamation over a piece she wrote in The Washington Post in 2018 as a survivor of domestic abuse. Heard counter-sued Depp for claiming her accusations were a hoax, and the televised trial last two months in 2022. In the end, Heard was ordered to pay Depp a total of $10.35 million and Depp was ordered to pay Heard $2 million.