Johnny Depp

John Christopher Depp II was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, the youngest of four children in a family that moved constantly before settling in Miramar, Florida; his parents divorced when he was fifteen. He dropped out of high school at sixteen to play guitar in a series of garage bands, eventually following one to Los Angeles, where his first marriage, to makeup artist Lori Anne Allison, introduced him to her friend Nicolas Cage. Cage pushed him toward acting almost as a favor; Depp's film debut came in Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, followed by three seasons as a reluctant teen idol on the Fox series 21 Jump Street, a role he later said had turned him into "a product."

Depp spent the 1990s escaping the Jump Street image by working almost exclusively with directors interested in outsiders: Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands in 1990, John Waters' Cry-Baby, Ed Wood in 1994. The Burton partnership ran to eight films over two decades. In 2003 he turned Captain Jack Sparrow, modeled on Keith Richards' cadence and a cartoon skunk's swagger, into a franchise that made him one of the highest-paid actors alive, with four Pirates of the Caribbean sequels through 2017 and prestige work alongside it, including a third Oscar nomination for Sweeney Todd in 2007. By the mid-2010s the box office had turned: The Lone Ranger, Transcendence, and Alice Through the Looking Glass all underperformed, and the studio relationships that had carried him for twenty years began to erode.

Depp's decline accelerated through his marriage to Amber Heard, wed in 2015 and divorced in 2017 amid mutual abuse allegations neither side has ever fully resolved in public opinion. He lost a 2020 libel case in the United Kingdom after a court found, on the evidence presented there, that he had assaulted Heard on multiple occasions, and Warner Bros. asked him to leave the Fantastic Beasts franchise as a result. In 2022 he sued Heard for defamation in Virginia and won: a jury awarded him 10 million dollars in compensatory damages and 5 million in punitive damages, later capped at 350,000 dollars under state law, while awarding Heard 2 million dollars on her countersuit. The two verdicts, reached under different legal standards in different countries, left the underlying question of what happened between them formally unresolved rather than settled.

Depp has spent the years since 2022 rebuilding rather than resting on the verdict: directing Modi in France, premiering Jeanne du Barry at Cannes in 2023, returning to music with the Hollywood Vampires alongside the late Jeff Beck, and signing on to play Ebenezer Scrooge for a 2026 release. Whether the industry that stepped back from him after 2020 has genuinely returned, or is simply willing to work with him again on a case-by-case basis, is not yet settled — and neither is the public's reading of him. Depp v. Heard produced legal outcomes on both sides of the Atlantic but not agreement.

Johnny Depp's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Edward Scissorhands film
  His first Golden Globe nomination and breakthrough with Tim Burton 1990
• Ed Wood film 1994
• Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl film
  Launched the franchise and his global stardom 2003
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street film
  Won a Golden Globe; his third Oscar nomination 2007
• Hollywood Vampires other
  Rock band with Alice Cooper and, until his 2023 death, Joe Perry 2015

• June 9, 1963 aged 0 Born in Owensboro, Kentucky
• 1979 aged ~16 Drops out of high school at sixteen to play in bands
• 1984 aged ~21 Makes his film debut in A Nightmare on Elm Street
• 1987 aged ~24 Becomes a teen idol on 21 Jump Street
• 1990 aged ~27 Stars in Edward Scissorhands, his first film with Tim Burton
• 2003 aged ~40 Debuts as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean
• 2020 aged ~57 Loses a UK libel case and leaves Fantastic Beasts
• June 1, 2022 aged 58 Wins his US defamation suit against Amber Heard Heard won 2 million dollars on her countersuit.
• 2023 aged ~60 Premieres Jeanne du Barry at the Cannes Film Festival

• Marlon Brando 1924–2004
  Actor whose method acting revolutionized film performance and influenced generations of actors. mentor and co-star
• Jack Nicholson b. 1937
  Three-time Oscar winner and one of the most celebrated actors in Hollywood history. co-star