![]() ![]() The actor has told how he woke up in a pool of his own blood more than once and said: 'I would never tell you the worst things that have happened to me.' It was claimed that Downey had been threatened, with one prisoner speculating that 'any day could be his last'. Vanity Fair said he seemed to rub along with his cellmates - Figueroa Slim, Timmons, Sugar Bear and Big Al - though there was a flashpoint when he spat toothpaste into the cell's sink - other prisoners wanted his germs to go down the toilet. Downey was quoted as saying: 'I'm just sinking deeper into my depression sessions. Four days after being arrested, he bolted through a detox centre bathroom window wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of slippers.Īs he put it, Downey was 'the poster boy for pharmaceutical mismanagement'. The tape of her 911 call was put on the internet, with Downey's heavy snoring audible in the background. While awaiting trial, he made matters worse with the 'Goldilocks' incident when he wandered into a neighbour's house, stripped to his underwear, folded his clothes on to a chair and passed out on an 11-year-old's bed, only to be discovered by an astonished mother who wondered if her son had gone to sleep early. In 1996 Downey was put on probation after an arrest for driving in Malibu with heroin, cocaine and a concealed. It is now a spectacular comeback because he was really low in the barrel.' Actors especially tend to need outside approval and have a problem of identity. 'I felt sorry for him because with all these great talents come the defects of talent. Like many in Hollywood, Stone was dismayed by Downey's fall. The desire to please and be loved I remember vividly.' 'He was brilliant to work with, outrageous in a constructive way,' he told The Observer. Its director, Oliver Stone, recalls a bright and eager talent. His subsequent films included the controversial Natural Born Killers. But then he beat Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman and Billy Crystal to play Charlie Chaplin in Sir Richard Attenborough's 1992 biopic and was nominated for an Oscar. One of his earliest roles, in Less Than Zero, was as a debt-ridded cocaine addict. He met actress Sarah Jessica Parker, who would go on to star in Sex and the City, and lived with her for five years before his drug addiction destroyed the relationship. giving a little kid a toke of grass just to be funny.'ĭowney dropped out of Santa Monica High School to act, landing a gig on Saturday Night Live at 20. And suddenly I knew I had made a terrible, stupid mistake. Robert Downey Sr, a film director, once recalled: 'And I go, "You ought to try a little of this instead of drinking." I passed him a joint. 'To have another shot at this, after what he's had and lost, is as redemptive as the movie itself.'īorn in New York, he was only six years old and sipping white wine, when his father offered him marijuana as a joke. 'He's on fire,' said Jon Favreau, director of Iron Man. ![]() In October, he will be in London to play Sherlock Holmes, in a film directed by Madonna's husband, Guy Ritchie. He has just finished The Soloist, directed by Britain's Joe Wright, in which he plays a Los Angeles Times journalist who befriends a musically gifted homeless schizophrenic (Jamie Foxx). Its box-office success guarantees a sequel, in 2010. Alongside Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in X-Men and Christian Bale and Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, there is his well-received turn in Iron Man. This year has seen Downey keep up with the fashion for serious actors to add gravitas to comic-book characters. The black face thing is potentially incendiary in the States, but I haven't heard a peep about what he's done with it.' It's a funny performance and he's got an exceptional charisma which manages never to come across as arrogance. He is 'the smartest actor on the block right now, never holding still long enough to warrant a charge of dramatic malice,' noted Anthony Lane in the New Yorkerīen Walters, a British-born writer about film based in New York, agreed: 'Robert Downey Jr is the best thing in the film. 'Blacking up' could have been a joke too far but critics in America seem to agree that Downey has got away with it, and that maybe only he could. Downey steals the show playing an Australian method actor who, cast as an African-American, dyes his skin black and remains in character even when not filming. Ben Stiller's spoof of Vietnam war movies has been described as the summer's funniest comedy, co-starring Stiller and Jack Black with Steve Coogan, Nick Nolte, Tobey Maguire and Tom Cruise. In Tropic Thunder, he fittingly plays an actor called Lazarus. Today Downey is free, at ease and on top of the heap.
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