Robert Downey Junior Biography

In a nutshell

The talented but troubled actor was always seemingly destined for the big screen, born to parents already in showbiz. His father (Robert Downey Senior) was an actor and filmmaker and cast his son in a couple of his own films before young Robert was in double-figures.
Little wonder then that by the mid-eighties he was a star and a paid-up member of the so-called Brat Pack in Hollywood alongside the likes of Rob Lowe and Emilio Estevez. His role in 1987 film Less Than Zero was critically acclaimed although there was not a little irony in the fact he was playing a junkie, with his own battle with drug-addiction soon to be making headline news.
In 1992 he won an Academy Award Nomination and Bafta for his starring role in Richard Attenborough's film Chaplin and married fellow actress Deborah Falconer after a mere six week courtship. He was also holding his own in many decent films such as Natural Born Killers (1994) but off-set his personal demons were getting the better of him.
Between 1996 and 2003 he was frequently arrested on narcotics' charges and was in and out of drug treatment programs till he was eventually sentenced to prison in 1999 on the (fairly accurate) assumption that he wasn't going to get clean on his own.
But the comeback kid struck back (albeit temporarily) with an Emmy Award and Golden Globe winning role in TV comedy series Ally Macbeal before being kicked off the show following his arrest once again for...yes you've guessed it, drug possession.
His (patently long-suffering) wife left him in 2004 and he turned his melancholy attention to making music (culminating in the release of debut album The Futurist the same year) and repairing his tarred reputation in the film industry.
Proving a cat really can have nine lives, he made another triumphant return to the screen with roles in films such as Tropic Thunder (2008) ? in which he famously sent-up a fellow Hollywood actor - and Guy Richie's Sherlock Holmes (2009) for which he won a Golden Globe.
He also got remarried to film producer Susan Levin, who he met on the set of his 2003 film Gothika and, with claims of being drug-free ever since, it looks like the actor has finally shook the monkey off his back. Robert Downey Junior Biography from (http://www.talktalk.co.uk/celebrity/biography/person/robert-downey-junior/238)

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Tuesday, September 27, 2011