Johnny Depp

On the other hand, had he won, he probably would have said, "Fuck it," and then manfully gotten up, given his little speech, taken the Thing home and pawned it off on his kids to play with. But that's Depp for you and has been for a very long time. He has a number of words he tries to live by. From the poem "Desiderata," by Max Ehrmann: "In the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy." From the preface to The Time of Your Life, by William Saroyan: "Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are the things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption." And from Depp himself, from deep within himself, when faced with his fears, doubts, anxieties, uncertainties and ambivalences, which are legion: "Fuck it!"

"I've ended up saying it in life a lot and in the work a lot, and I've always found it very helpful," he said. "Yes," he went on, between sips of red wine, " 'Fuck it,' over the years, has always been pretty soothing."

Not so very long ago, the Depp name in marquee lights wasn't exactly a heart-thumping box-office draw. Burned by his first big experience in Hollywood, in the late Eighties, when the Fox network turned him into a David Cassidy-type teen idol on the TV show 21 Jump Street, he decided right then to never again be part of anyone's machine but his own, and his own machine is anything but conventional; it's positively, infernally Rube Goldberg-ian, which has left him swerving hither and yon though roles that call for great big bunches of silence (Secret Window), the wearing of swell, pink Angora sweaters (Ed Wood), hands that can prune hedges (Edward Scissorhands), a way with women that he may in fact possess (Don Juan DeMarco) and that have him strutting through the L.A. airport, in a sweet white suit, fat shades covering his eyes, to the tune of Ram Jam's "Black Betty" (Blow), one of the greatest moments in all of cinema, bama lam bama lam. Critics love him, magazine writers fawn over him, and he's developed a fan base like no other (with many a pubic hair winding up in his daily mail), largely because his performances are most often off-kilter, angled and light, full of soul, tenderness, toughness, sincerity and grace, expressed through the liquid cadences of his voice and his diction, his beautiful man-boy face, the unerring and particular use of limbs to amplify and enhance, the whole shebang centrifically whipped together, and so forth. One could go on.