He's the Wizard of Odd on the road less traveled. Among movie clones and conformers, actor Johnny Depp has blazed his own trail. Some of his films have succeeded beyond wildest studio expectations. Some have crashed and burned and have never been heard from again. But freakish or tender, profound or peculiar, Johnny Depp is ever-changing, an actor endlessly exploring the ramifications of the strange and the wonderful, a voyager going where few have gone before.
A glance at his beginnings did not indicate thespian promise. Born in the provincial wilderness of Owensboro, Kentucky, and raised in Florida, Depp dropped out of school at 15 to follow that all-American dream of growing up to be a rock star. A chance meeting with actor Nicolas Cage led to a few small film roles and a recurring part on a popular television series, 21 Jump Street, which turned him into a teen-age heartthrob. But Depp's willingness to take a chance on peculiar roles led to his breakout part in 1990 as the digitally-challenged Edward Scissorhands for director Tim Burton, the first in a continuing collaboration between actor and director. Ed Wood in 1994 saw Depp dressed in women's angora sweaters as he directed a depressed Bela Lugosi (played by Martin Landau) in a series of truly awful vampire movies. Five years later, in Sleepy Hollow, Depp put on a characteristic Burtonian eccentricity to play Ichabod Crane going "mano y mano" with the Headless Horseman. In 2005, the dangerous duo riffed on the joys of necrophilia in The Corpse Bride and then took author Roald Dahl's children's classic, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory out for a ride, losing themselves in a steaming swamp of acid colors and geisha girl coyness. They're now filming Sweeney Todd, a character construct of the demon barber of Fleet Street, who in nineteenth-century London turned his customers into meat pies. The partnership of Depp and Burton, sign-posted by a notice "beware all who enter here," continues to flourish.
