Robert Downey Jr - Biography

Name: Robert Downey Jr

Born: 4 April 1965 (Age: 44)

Where: New York, New York USA

Height: 5' 9"

Awards: Won 1 BAFTA, 2 Golden Globes. Nominated for 2 Oscars

Seldom in cinema's history has an actor risen as high and fallen as hard as Robert Downey Jr. First coming to public attention in the mid-Eighties as a minor member of the so-called Brat Pack, he'd quickly garner a reputation as a performer of considerable substance with his efforts in Less Than Zero and, especially, Chaplin. Just as rapidly, though, his reliance on drink and drugs would see his career wrecked and the man himself in continual conflict with the forces of the law. In and out of rehab and jail he went, only revealing flashes of his thespian excellence, before finally, in his forties, breaking free of intoxicants and taking his rightful place on the world stage. It had been a long, strange and often dangerous journey.

Downey was born on the 4th of April, 1965, in Greenwich Village, New York City. His parents were film-maker Robert Downey Sr and actress, dancer and writer Elsie Ford, respectively of Jewish-Irish and German-Scottish extraction. Though Robert Jr would claim it was his mother who inspired him to choose a life in the performing arts, he was also clearly influenced by his father's adventurous spirit.

Born in 1936 in Tennessee, Robert Downey Sr was one of two sons produced by Jewish American Robert Elias and Irish model and magazine editor Betty McLoughlin. When still very young, though, his parents would split and Betty would marry one Jimmy Downey, a childhood friend of the famous singer and even more famous songwriter Johnny Mercer, the man who penned That Old Black Magic, Autumn Leaves and Moon River. When in 1941 Mercer embarked upon a scandalous affair with a 19-year-old Judy Garland, an affair that continued into her marriage to composer David Rose (writer of The Stripper), it was Betty Downey who, horrified by the destructive effect of her friend Mercer's love-sickness, took a cab to MGM and confronted Garland, persuading her to let Mercer go.

Come the age of 16, Robert Sr would decide to escape a dull life at Long Island High School and a prickly relationship with his strong-minded mother by joining the army. Faking a birth certificate and taking the surname of his stepfather Downey, he'd sign up for three years. He was not a good soldier, but he was a good sportsman, becoming both a Golden Gloves champion and a baseball hero, at one point pitching out the legendary Yogi Berra. He'd also, in the long periods of spare time the army afforded him, begin to write, a career he'd pursue after his discharge. He'd write a novel, a poor cousin to The Catcher In The Rye, that attracted a top agent but would never be published.

He'd also score a series of small acting jobs and write a play that was produced off-off-Broadway, supporting himself, in the time-honoured tradition, by working as a waiter in Times Square.

. Come 1960, Downey would meet and begin working with film editor and avant-gardiste Fred von Bernewitz, taking his first step into cinema with 1961's Balls Bluff, where a Union soldier was magically transported from a Civil War battlefield to present day Central Park. His follow-up, 1964's Babo 73, would be even wilder, a comedy digging into psychiatry and shoe-fetishism and taking swipes at the excesses of both the Catholic Church and the Civil Rights movement.

The year before Babo 73's release had seen Downey become a father when daughter Alysson was born. Young Robert would arrive around the release of his dad's The Sweet Smell Of Sex, where a girl new to New York would have to fend off the unwanted advances of pretty much every guy she meets. Then would come fame, or at least notoriety, with his film Chafed Elbows, a comedy cutting stills into live action, featuring Elsie Ford, where a man would marry his mother and they'd both go on welfare, as the film turns into a twisted musical. The movie, a light-hearted but pointed assault on the capitalist establishment, was at the cutting -edge of the new counter-culture, and was consequently frowned upon, even being banned in Boston. In New York, though, it would be a big cult hit, playing for 10 months at the Bleecker Street cinema on a double-bill with Kenneth Anger's infamous Scorpio Rising. Downey would suddenly find himself called upon to lecture in colleges and to direct TV ads and even a porn movie, jobs he'd take in order to provide for his new family. The ads would always be pushing at the boundaries of taste while the porn movie would annoy its backers no end as it was very funny but not remotely pornographic. Having cemented his reputation with 1968's No More Excuses, Downey would reach a new peak with the next year's Putney Swopes.

Putney Swopes was a revelation to many, marking Downey as a pioneer of American independent cinema. Based on Downey's own work experiences it would see a black guy, hired by an advertising firm in an act of tokenism, put in charge of the company and its campaigns. Firing all the honkies, he refuses to advertise booze, fags or toy guns, and starts talking straight, his efforts being so frank and shocking people stay in to watch them and don't go out buying stuff. Corporate and racial complications naturally ensue. The film would be described in reviews as "vile" and "offensive" but would still make New York Magazine's Top 10 films of the year and be hugely influential on independent film-makers, and help to usher in the blaxploitation era, Alan Arkin describing Downey as "one of the most original voices in the history of American film".

There'd be yet more controversy when Downey directed David Rabe's Sticks And Bones as a live broadcast for CBS, vital sponsors pulling out at the last due to the play's virulently anti-war message.

. Downey's next movie would bring his son's cinematic debut. Based on Downey's off-off-Broadway play The Comeuppance, this was Pound, a strange existential comedy where actors would play dogs in a city shelter, wondering at their lives and the very real possibility of impending death. Elsie would feature again, and Alysson, , Downey believing it was easier to put the kids in his movie than find a babysitter. Also involved would be Downey regulars Stan Gottlieb and Antonio Fargas, yet to find fame as Huggy Bear in Starsky And Hutch. The movie would be seriously hammy, packed with puns, songs and philosophical wonderings, and would yet again challenge America's social status quo. Elsie would sing That Old Black Magic (written by Johnny Mercer, that old friend of her husband's mother) to a black man pretending to be a dog, Gottlieb would be a boxer, punch-drunk in his robe and gloves, and young Robert would be a lost puppy, sweetly asking Lawrence Wolf's Mexican Hairless if he has hair on his scrotum. Odd words, you'd think, to put into the mouth of a five-year-old, but worse was yet to come.

Robert Jr's second appearance would be in his father's next film, Greaser's Palace, another outrageous piece, this time a comic western and religious parable where Allan Arbus would play a Christ figure in a frontier town, healing the sick, raising the dead, dancing on the water, but much happier when performing his colourful nightclub routine. There'd be slapstick comedy, crude humour and eye-popping violence, the movie being put together as a series of skits involving - amongst many, many other things - masturbation, transvestites and gay midgets. Elsie would feature again, along with Toni Basil and Herve Villechaize, with Robert Jr appearing as a kid who gets his throat cut. Robert Sr wondered whether such a scene of violence might be traumatizing for the youngster, but his son was already well aware of the nature of acting. He had not yet, though, learned the etiquette. When his father said he'd been great but could they play the scene one more time, young Robert, keen to go back to the house, asked why, if he'd been so great, was another take necessary? Much to the amusement of the crew, the kid shook his finger at his father and agreed to one more take. However, this time a bird flew into shot. Once more, called Robert Sr, only to face blunt refusal from his son, the kid having to be led behind a wagon, tapped on the ass and sternly spoken to before he'd go in front of the cameras again.

Robert Jr's early life was undoubtedly unusual. He'd later describe it as a "boheme pressure-fest". Robert Sr being a workaholic, there'd often be dailies screened on a sheet in the living-room.

The house would be endlessly visited by such friends as director Hal Ashby and activist Abbie Hoffman. Acting was normal, cinema a part of everyday life. You'd eat some pizza, act, go bowling, watch a Nouvelle Vague double bill, act some more. Art was the norm, music a constant. By the age of seven, Robert Jr was playing Thelonius Monk on the piano. He'd also be introduced to writing methods, his mother and father both working on material and constantly trying out lines on each other. But there'd also be drugs, marijuana being another ever-present in the Downey household. At a party when the boy was just eight his father would let him try his first puff on a reefer. It sounds outlandish, but this was a different time, a time of experimenting and truth-seeking, of moving away from the establishment's intolerant culture of lies. "Back then", Robert Sr would later explain "we thought 'Why be a hypocrite?' We should have been hypocrites. I was a real jerk about drugs".

Things would quickly get worse. After Greaser's Palace failed to replicate the buzz around Putney Swope, Robert Sr found it hard to find financial backers for his work. During the editing of Greaser's Palace, in order to hit the deadline, he'd begun to partake of the cocaine currently sweeping the nation. Now, depressed by this setback in his film-making, he took up the drug with a vengeance, snorting pretty much round the clock for the next ten years. He'd later reveal how he'd use coke to stay up long into the night writing, and how Robert Jr would be there, too. "I'd have a little grass or take a little coke to stay up and write," he'd say "and my son would come down in his little pyjamas and sit and he'd say 'If you can do it, why can't I do it?' And I'd say 'That's a good question, but why would you want to do it?' And he'd say 'Because I don't want to go to bed either'. What a schmuck I was. If I had it to do all over again, I probably wouldn't be doing it myself, let alone allowing them to do it".

Most would be shocked by Downey Sr's behaviour, particularly in light of Robert Jr's later problems, and the torment faced by his sister Alysson, who'd suffer both coke addiction and bulimia for some fifteen years. But Robert Jr himself would take the kind of liberal and forgiving stance you'd expect from his father's son, believing Robert Sr was expressing his love in the only way he knew how. "If my father were less of a pioneer," he'd say "he probably would have been more of a father, but I wouldn't be who I was. I think it's valiant to make mistakes so your children don't have to".

The family would move around in search of work and inspiration. They'd spend time in Connecticut, where young Robert would briefly befriend one Richard Hall, later to find fame as Moby. There'd also be a short stint in London where Robert would attend the Perry House School, learning ballet but, as he'd later admit, spending most of his time in the classroom corner "for being a moron".

Robert Sr's next film would not arrive till 1975.

This was Moment To Moment, co-written by and starring Elsie, who'd be credited as LC Downey. It was a return to the underground for Robert Sr and would be seen as something of a filmic love letter to his wife, who appeared in ten separate roles. Unfortunately, their relationship was breaking down and they would soon separate. Robert would stay with his mother in a tiny one-room flat on 46th Street, while Alysson would go with her father to Woodstock for two years before moving on to Los Angeles. Still Robert Jr's connection to film would remain strong, his mum scoring a part in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a TV series starring Louise Lasser that sent up soap operas and dealt with weighty social topics like impotence and sexual perversion in a straightforward and unashamed manner. Too controversial by far, it would not last long, though the fairly similar Soap, starring Billy Crystal, would appear the next year and prove a huge hit.

. Keen to get involved in his parents' business, from 1976 to 1978 Robert Jr would spend part of his summers at the Stagedoor Manor, a performing arts summer camp at the former Karmel Hotel in Loch Sheldrake in upstate New York. This had once formed part of the Catskills Borscht Belt, but had been redesigned in the early Seventies and now contained seven or more theatre spaces. Each summer, the venue would host three three-week-long sessions for kids aged between 10 and 18 and would produce eight musicals and five dramas. Kids would be taught voice techniques, improvisation, acting for TV and film, ballet, tap, choreography and plenty of sport, all they'd need for a career in showbiz. Many notable actors would attend over the years, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Mary Stuart Masterson, Nathalie Portman, Bryce Dallas Howard, Zach Braff and Todd Graff (who'd actually make a film about his experiences, called Camp). Stagedoor would also train a raft of producers, managers, lawyers, publicists and casting agents who'd go on to form a nepotistic Hollywood elite. Known for showing preference to fellow alumni, they'd become known as the Stagedoor Mafia. On Downey's arrival, Todd Graff, a former pupil now acting as a counsellor, described him as hyperactive, already chasing girls, talented, mischievous and a pain in the arse.

Before long, the sociable Robert Jr found life with his mother too constricting. Sharing that tiny flat, he couldn't have friends round, couldn't get a girlfriend, so he took off to join his father in Los Angeles, dad having a much bigger place, with a pool. First he'd enrol at Lincoln Junior High in Santa Monica, then move on to Santa Monica High School where he'd be able to reinvent himself. Looking back later, Downey would claim that he'd always felt displaced. At school in New York he'd never been able to talk about what his dad did for a living, for fear of mockery or retribution.

He'd been embarrassed when his mother had picked him up while wearing a big quilted cape - none of the other kids had parents like that. Beyond this he was Jewish and Irish and German and Scottish, not one thing, not anything. Given his father's change of name, he wasn't really even Robert Downey Jr.

. In Los Angeles, though, he could really be something. Here he was the cool outsider from New York, a black-clad daredevil with spiky hair, who'd streak down the beach, create havoc when attempting to drive, wig out on booze, cocaine and bangin' music like Black Flag and The Clash.

It was all a front. Robert didn't really like punk rock. His personal favourites included the likes of Genesis, Supertramp and Steely Dan. He'd enjoyed singing Schubert in choral competitions and also sang in the mall during holidays. He was really a theatre brat, but he kept all this quiet in order to impress his new pals and score trendy girlfriends. The drugs, too, weren't that cool. After a decade of abuse, Downey's father had at last cleaned up, encouraged by his new partner, Laura Ernst, and was mortified that his son was following his bad lead. Robert Jr had seen the pain, experienced the rehab, but still kept on. The buzz was the thing, the heightened level, the fast life, the big laughs and, above all, the performance of it all.

At the time, Santa Monica High School was a hot-bed of performers. Recent alumni included Sean Penn and Emilio Estevez, both of whom went straight into film. Downey would be taught tap by Estevez's brother Ramon, and would be joined on campus by the likes of Rob Lowe, Chris Penn and Charlie Sheen, who were already making Super 8 movies together. The future looked bright, but it wasn't bright enough for Downey. Tiring of high school, at 17 he decided to drop out and try to make it in New York theatre. His teachers tried to persuade him to stay but his father, himself a youthful adventurer, was more supportive, allowing him to leave as long as he got himself a job and became productive. So, off he went to New York, working as a bus-boy (once serving peppermint tea to Sting), and in a shoe store and attending every audition he could. He also continued his decadent lifestyle, a visiting Ramon Estevez noticing that Downey was drinking like a sailor on leave.

In the early part of 1983, Downey would score his first proper theatre role in Stuart Hample's Alms For The Middle Class, exploring a father's relationship with his estranged son. This would take him to the Geva Theatre in Rochester, by Lake Ontario in upstate New York. Later in the year he'd join his old Stagedoor mucker Todd Graff in American Passion at the Joyce Theatre in New York City, a play produced by Stuart Ostrow's Musical Theatre Lab, directed by Norman Lear and also featuring Sam Slovick, who'd soon appear in the TV series Fame and alongside Downey's high school peer Charlie Sheen in Red Dawn. Sadly, American Passion would last for only a single performance.

The next year would bring Downey's final stage appearance, in Fraternity at the Colonnades Theatre Lab.

. Throughout his brief theatrical career, Downey was trying hard to win film work, lying wildly about his experience which, until now, involved only those brief appearances for his father and a couple of plays at high school. He was also hampered by a sharp tongue that, when casting directors asked him how he was supporting himself, had him snappily reply "With my spine". Several parts were lost that way. He was in fact supporting himself by working as a waiter at a restaurant called Central Falls and, at one point, as a piece of living sculpture at the infamous nightclub Area on Hudson Street, a super-fabulous venue containing art-work by Basquiat, a pool designed by David Hockney and, once, the nuclear reactor set from the film Silkwood. In this pre-AIDs world, carefree clubbers would often have sex between the projector and the screen, creating a giant shadow show for delighted punters. Downey was living the high-life, too, often high on booze, coke and mushrooms.

Having not appeared onscreen since a pop-up cameo in his father's ramshackle Up the Academy, a tawdry comedy presented by Mad magazine and featuring Ralph Macchio, Antonio Fargas and Barbara Bach, Downey worked hard to score film roles. And, quickly, they would come his way. First would come Baby It's You, directed by John Sayles and co-produced by Griffin Dunne, where a college-bound Rosanna Arquette left 1960s New Jersey and her Frank Sinatra-worshipping boyfriend Vincent Spano. Downey would work for four weeks on the film, serving as the prom date of Arquette's best friend, but all his scenes would be cut, bar one where he could be spotted in the background. Downey would find this excruciatingly embarrassing as he'd told all his friends he was on his way to the top.

His next effort would be far more successful. This was Firstborn, directed by Michael Apted, who'd recently hit big with The Coal Miner's Daughter. Here single mum Terri Garr would think she'd found new love with Peter Weller. Her young sons, though, played by Christopher Collet and Corey Haim, would recognize him as a drug-dealer and violent scumbag and risk their lives trying to get rid of him, Downey appearing as one of Haim's buddies.

The film was not a hit, but it did introduce Downey to the first love of his life, the actress Sarah Jessica Parker, who'd played Collet's girlfriend. Where Downey was a party animal who worked first and foremost to pay for his social life, Parker was an ambitious performer. Though, like Downey, she was only 19, she had years of solid experience behind her. Having studied at the School for Creative and Performing Arts, at the age of 11 she'd appeared on the New York stage as Flora in The Innocents, based on The Turn Of the Screw, directed by Harold Pinter and starring Claire Bloom.

She'd then appeared alongside Shirley Jones in The Sound Of Music, then moved on to the original Broadway production of Annie, appearing first as an orphan named July then, in 1979, taking the title role. With the Cincinnati Ballet Company she'd danced in the Nutcracker and Firebird, and performed La Sylphide with the American Ballet Company. Beyond this she'd appeared in the TV movie My Body, My Child, an abortion drama starring Vanessa Redgrave and featuring Parker's future co-star Cynthia Nixon, and had taken a lead role in the sitcom Square Pegs. In 1984, she'd appear in the major hit Footloose, as well as Firstborn. With her career going so well, all she needed was a partner and she found one in Downey. Though not an obvious choice for such a dedicated performer, given his penchant for narcotics, she's said she found him "very mercurial and odd, but also completely open". They'd be together for the next seven years.

. To begin with, their stars would rise in tandem. Parker would star in Girls Just Want To Have Fun and score a part in the classic kids' movie Flight Of The Navigator. After this, though, she would struggle in TV movies till making a cinematic comeback as Steve Martin's vivacious lover in LA Story. Downey would suffer no such drop in his fortunes. Not yet, anyway. 1985 would see him in a slew of releases. After the short Deadwait, he'd appear in Tuff Turf, where James Spader would star as a rich East Coast kid arriving in a rough school in LA and falling for Kim Richards, girlfriend of a local gang member. Naturally, he must take on the gang to win his big-haired prize, and helping him in his endeavours would be Downey, a dorky outsider in bondage trousers who plays drums in a band. Interestingly, the leader of the band would be Jim Carroll, whose Jim Carroll Band would hit big in the teen market. A former basketball prodigy, Carroll's 1978 autobiography would form the basis of 1995's The Basketball Diaries, featuring Leonardo Dicaprio, Mark Wahlberg and Downey's future co-star Juliette Lewis.

After this, Downey would enjoy his first big hit with John Hughes' Weird Science. Hughes was hot after Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club and here he gave the lead to Anthony Michael Hall, who'd appeared in both his previous movies. In Weird Science, Hall and his buddy Ilan Mitchell-Smith would play teenage computer nerds who, utterly useless with the opposite sex, feed their specifications for the perfect woman into their compie and, one Frankenstein-like lightning flash later, out pops Kelly LeBrock. Beautiful, pneumatic but also wise, she sets about helping them improve their lives, and this involves taking down Hall's beastly older brother, Bill Paxton, and the local school bullies, Downey and Robert Russler. Thus the sharp-tongued and ludicrously dressed Downey is humiliated and deprived of his hot girlfriend.

And he'd be flasher yet in the epic miniseries Mussolini: The Untold Story where George C Scott would strut and bellow as the Italian despot, Downey playing his dashing son Bruno, a daring fighter pilot and veteran of combat in Spain and Ethiopia, who's killed in an air accident in 1941.

. 1985 would end with an odd career move when he joined the team at Saturday Night Live. The show was then in turmoil. A great line-up had been put together, built around Jim Belushi, Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Rich Hall, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and the public had reacted well. Ratings were up, people were talking of a repeat of the glory years when John Belushi, Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd ruled. But now the entire cast had quit and producer Lorne Michaels, returning after five years away, had to rebuild, and rebuild fast. He decided to go for youth and one of his main targets was Anthony Michael Hall, after those Hughes movies the hottest young star of the day and, at just 17, SNL's youngest ever performer. In turn Hall would recommend a friend he'd made making Weird Science, the 20-year-old Downey. At his audition Downey would tear off his teeshirt and do an impression of a drunk Iranian fellow he'd met in a nightclub. The producers laughed, and so he and Hall were hired for the 1985-86 season, sharing the office once used by SNL greats Aykroyd and John Belushi, and joining the likes of Joan Cusack, Randy Quaid, Jon Lovitz, Dennis Miller and Damon Wayans.

The new season would start disastrously. The new team was hyped extensively and the first show was hosted by new mega-star Madonna. When it bombed the knives were out. Saturday Night Dead was an oft-used phrase in the papers. The second show featured the return of Chevy Chase, star of SNL's very first season, but this was even worse than the Madonna fiasco as Chase, no longer able to distinguish between sharp humour and cruelty, set about the cast. "Didn't your father used to be a successful director?" he asked a painfully crestfallen Downey. "Whatever happened to him? Boy, he sure died, you know, he sure went to hell".

The season would contain a couple of successful shows, notably when hosted by Pee-Wee Herman and Ronald Reagan's son (other hosts would include John Lithgow, Tom Hanks, Dudley Moore, George Wendt, Terri Garr and Anjelica Huston) but SNL was struggling and everyone knew it. During the George Wendt show they even had a running gag where Francis Ford Coppola attempted to boost their flagging ratings. Lorne Michaels' gamble on youth had failed to pay off. The cast found it hard to convince as older characters and the writers were thus terribly limited in their subject matter. Beyond this, Hall and Downey would have to shoot Out Of Bounds and Back to School respectively, filming for a couple of days a week then returning, exhausted, to an already fraught SNL.

Extra aggravation was caused by Wayans, upset by being denied an opportunity to shine and eventually sacked in spectacular style when he derailed a sketch live on air. Only Lovitz would break through, along with Nora Dunn and Miller with his news updates. Cusack would show her talent, but not be retained. When it came to the last show of the season, there'd be a sketch where the cast would excitedly discuss their hopes for the next series. Meanwhile, out the back, their dressing-room is being doused in petrol and Lorne Michaels is telling Lovitz to go wait in the limo outside. Everyone knew that the Hall/Downey experiment had been a catastrophe. Indeed, for the first time, it looked like SNL might actually be canned.

. No matter, Downey was still on the up, with brighter prospects on the horizon. 1986 would be his last year of struggle for a while, featuring just two supporting roles. First would come the aforementioned Back To School, starring comedian Rodney Dangerfield as a rich businessman who discovers that his beloved son, Keith Gordon, is his college's resident wimp, a born waterboy. Taking matters into his own hands, he enrols at the school himself and begins to throw his money around, hiring expensive teachers (one is Kurt Vonnegut) and trying to show his boy how to stand up for himself. Downey would appear as Gordon's room-mate, yet another quirky outsider, a smart social outcast with black gear and a semi-mohawk. It was a reasonable effort, but mainly a vehicle for Dangerfield's stand-up. Far stranger would be America, a reunion with Robert Downey Sr, where a low-grade cable news station accidentally bounces its signal off the moon and becomes a worldwide broadcasting phenomenon. In a satire of news coverage, items would become ever more bizarre and anchorman Zack Norman, caught by his wife with a skirt in his suitcase, would have to pretend to be a transvestite to get off the hook, even carrying out his interviews in drag. Downey Jr would play his son.

1987 would see Downey at last step into the spotlight with his first two leading roles. First would come The Pick-Up Artist, written and directed by James Toback, who'd earlier helmed Exposed, a dodgy thriller containing one of cinema's most erotic scenes, where Nastassja Kinski is seduced by Rudolf Nureyev with a violin-bow. Here a drunken Dennis Hopper would owe big money to sadistic mobster Harvey Keitel and Hopper's daughter Molly Ringwald would take off for Atlantic City, hoping to strike it lucky and save her dad. Downey, meanwhile, would be a womanising teacher who picks up Ringwald and has her in his car, only to fall for her and attempt to help her in her mission. His character would be based on Toback himself, a notorious lech, Toback having seen Downey's efforts on Saturday Night Live and decided Downey had the requisite nerve. Downey would repay the favour later, appearing in several of Toback's subsequent movies.

More important than The Pick-Up Artist would be Less Than Zero, based on the controversial bestseller by Bret Easton Ellis. Exploring the empty decadence of rich kids in Beverly Hills, this would see Downey set up in the music business by his wealthy father but quickly blowing his fortune on a heady cocktail of drugs, women and fast cars. Though his friend Andrew McCarthy tries to help, Downey gets deeper into debt with his dealer, played by his Tuff Turf co-star James Spader, and gradually sinks into prostitution. As he was in The Pick-Up Artist, Downey would be slick and charming. This time, though, he'd be bolstered by cocaine rather than self-confidence, and would suffer a horrifying loss of dignity amidst the glittering trappings of Hollywood success.

. Less Than Zero would see Downey vaunted as the next big hope, one of the few Brat Pack actors capable of rising to greatness. His life was looking good - to a degree. His relationship with Parker was still going strong., in 1988 the couple buying a big pink house in Beverly Hills, originally built for Charlie Chaplin. Parker would do her best to keep him healthy, persuading him to help furnish the place, encouraging him to seek pleasure in things other than drink and drugs. And he did. Downey loved the freedom that came with money, loved the clothes and the toys he could buy. For him, acting was still predominantly a way of funding his lifestyle, and his lifestyle was lavish.

However, despite Parker's efforts, Downey was on a downward spiral. Still punky and bohemian in attitude, he was, as said, very cavalier in terms of his work, considering himself far cooler than those busily building their homes and careers. Up until now, this had been working for him. From here on, it didn't. Downey claimed that in Less Than Zero he'd begun playing the junkie Julian Wells as an exaggeration of himself, "then things changed and, in some ways, I became an exaggeration of the character. That lasted for far longer than it needed to". Downey would try anything, "from rope to Sterno", his friend Josh Richman later describing their shared debauchery as "unthinkable and grandiosely surreal". At last Parker, Downey's father and his manager Loree Rodkin got him into rehab, Robert Downey Sr saying of Parker "Without her, Robert would go at 100mph into a brick wall". But the battle was constant. Downey would stay sober for a couple of months, then go madly, wildly off the rails. On one press tour, he'd go down to the hotel lobby for cigarettes and disappear for four days.

Onscreen, his work would remain patchy as he continued to take work for the money, only occasionally bumping into interesting projects. The weak Johnny Be Good would be another teen movie, where again he'd play second fiddle to Anthony Michael Hall. Here Hall would play a high school football star sorely tempted by a series of colleges to leave his hometown and girlfriend Uma Thurman.

Downey would play Hall's neurotic, flamboyant best friend, encouraging him to hold out for the best deal, but then himself being bribed to deliver Hall to some Californian college. Also on the bill would be Jennifer Tilly, and she'd join Downey in his next venture, his father's movie industry satire Rented Lips. Here Dick Shawn and Martin Mull would play documentary film makers who, in order to secure a cast and crew for their study of Indian farming techniques, agree to complete a porn film involving pervy sex in Nazi Germany and turn it into a musical horror show. Downey Jr would appear as the temperamental star of the porn film, taking the appropriate moniker Wolf Dangler.

. Next would come 1969, written and directed by Ernest Thompson , who'd earlier penned On Golden Pond. This would contemplate the generational divide during the Vietnam conflict and the way friendships, morals and ideals were tested. The movie would see Kiefer Sutherland and Downey as college students and lifelong friends returning to their small town, Sutherland being a scholarly hippie pacifist and Downey a decadent hedonist, keen to avoid the draft so he can continue to live the high life, as it were. Familial complications would be added when Downey's mother, Joanna Cassidy, begins an affair with Sutherland's conservative father, Bruce Dern, and Downey's sister, Winona Ryder, falls for Sutherland. This would be followed by a one-minute cameo in That's Adequate, another film industry satire, this time written and directed by Harry Hurwitz. Downey would appear in a clip of a film entitled Albert Einstein On The Bounty, playing Einstein, joining a stellar cast including Bruce Willis, a young Ben Stiller, and Stiller's parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara.

1989 would be a better year, beginning with True Believer where James Woods would play a fast-talking lawyer, a burnt-out case who once stood up for civil liberties and now defends drug dealers for easy money. Downey would join him as a idealistic graduate who persuades Woods to take the case of a wrongly imprisoned Korean, leading to a dangerous investigation, a fraught court case and sudden, unexpected revelations. Beside a typically wired Woods, Downey would look ordinary, but would get more of an opportunity to shine in the same year's Chances Are. Here Cybill Shepherd would lose her husband and raise daughter Mary Stuart Masterson (another former Stagedoor pupil) on her own. Meanwhile Shepherd's husband's soul has returned to Earth in the body of Downey, now a student at Yale and Downey and Masterson become college sweethearts. When he meets her mum, though, memories from his former life flood back, and he must cope with the raging emotions of two women and deal with the fact that he's dating his own daughter. Such an outlandish story needed to be played deadly seriously to have any hope of convincing, and Downey did his work well.

The new decade would begin with Air America, where Downey would play a helicopter pilot checking on the weather for a radio station and sacked for his foolish stunts. Instead he's hired by the government to fly for what's supposed to be a civilian airline in Laos but is in fact a front for a CIA smuggling operation transporting guns, money and drugs around south-east Asia. Mel Gibson would play the grizzled veteran to Downey green recruit, the pair sharing some spirited banter and daredevil action while Downey struggles with the moral dilemma of it all. Downey had almost lost the part due to rumours about his drug-taking, his agent convincing producers that he was doing post-production in London when he was in fact in rehab in Arizona. Very different would be Too Much Sun, a sex farce written and directed by Robert Downey Sr. Here a millionaire would die and leave $250 million to his kids, Eric Idle and Andrea Martin. Unfortunately, they can only inherit if they each produce a child within one year, a problem as both of them are gay. Ralph Macchio, who'd appeared with Downey Jr in Up The Academy, would play a con man, with Downey Jr as his sleazy partner, posing as Martin's long-lost son. The scene of Downey masturbating while his fake mother sings a lullaby would be just one of many controversial moments, others seeing Idle on the job with a prostitute, Karate Kid Macchio watching porn and a priest pumping a nun. The movie was looking for shocks but finding mostly silliness. Far better would be Michael Hoffman's star-studded Soapdish concerning the on and off-screen shenanigans of the cast and crew of a popular daytime soap. Sally Field would play the star of the show, America's sweetheart, whose position is in jeopardy as sex bomb rival Cathy Moriarty is trying to seduce seedy young producer Downey into writing her out of the show ("Get rid of her and Mr Fuzzy is yours", she purrs). So Downey, a shameless fraud and backstabber who'll do anything to get ahead, brings back Field's former lover Kevin Kline, supposedly killed on the show twenty years before, and devises a plot where the upstanding and kind Field murders a homeless girl. Naturally, it all descends into chaos.

. As mentioned, Downey was doing some good work, but mostly he was driven by a desire to finance his lifestyle. Though he'd attended AA meetings and even stayed clean while filming Air America in Thailand, where drugs were readily available, he was falling off the wagon with regularity and ease. His friend Rayce Newman would recall one scene where "I had a gun, freebase cocaine, powder cocaine, Ecstasy. I'm holding the wheel, going 100mph, high as a kite, and he (Downey) is taking a hit off a cocaine pipe". Downey's partner Parker was fighting a losing battle when it came to saving him from himself and now, after all these years, she'd had enough, the couple splitting in 1991.

Though the separation must have come as an immense relief to her, in a way it was a terrible shame as the former golden couple should really have been sharing their most triumphant moment, with Parker making a cinematic comeback in LA Story and Downey, well, Downey was about to make up for all that lost time with the greatest performance of his early career.

. Having admitted to being "pretty lazy" in his previous films, Downey would pull out all the stops in securing and preparing for the role of Charlie Chaplin in Richard Attenborough's epic of early Hollywood. He mastered Chaplin's walk and mannerisms, his accent, even learned to play tennis and the violin left-handed. In doing so, he won out over Billy Crystal, Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams and was brilliantly convincing in his portrayal of Chaplin between the ages of 19 and 83 as he went from a music hall education to superstardom, suffering at the hands of his mad mum (played by Chaplin's own daughter Geraldine), engaging in relationships with Moira Kelly, Milla Jovovich and Diane Lane, and facing conflict in the US courts and with the FBI. Also on the bill would be former co-stars James Woods and Kevin Kline, the latter playing Douglas Fairbanks, as well as Anthony Hopkins and Marisa Tomei. Downey would be Oscar-nominated for his efforts and many would feel he was robbed when Al Pacino took home the prize for his overblown work in Scent Of A Woman. Downey would also be nominated for a Golden Globe and win a BAFTA.

This should have marked a new beginning for Downey. After his split from Sarah Jessica Parker he had fallen for Sacramento-born Deborah Falconer, a model for the Elite agency and also a singer and occasional actress. After a six-week romance, the couple would marry in May, 1992, with son Indio being born a year or so later. Downey had also co-written and starred in the documentary The Last Party where he showed up at the Democratic and Republican conventions of 1992, interviewing such varied subjects as Bill Clinton, Oliver North, Spike Lee, Jerry Falwell, feminists and homeless people to give a picture of America at the time. He'd also, running naked through crowds, being lectured on self-respect by a young kid and often wondering aloud to camera, give a picture of intelligent, humorous, humane and exhibitionist self.

Beyond this, Chaplin had confirmed Downey's early promise as an actor and he was now viewed as one of the finest of his generation. He was all set for great things. But the great things didn't come. The exciting and challenging roles that Downey coveted were being taken by his peers and he looked on in envy as Partick Swayze seized City Of Joy and Woody Harrelson took the leads in Natural Born Killers and The People Vs Larry Flint. After Chaplin had wrapped, Downey had tried to separate himself from his drug-fuelled past by burying the clothes he'd worn in Less Than Zero in the garden of his new Malibu home.

With a new wife and a kid on the way, it was time to be responsible but, as an Oscar nominee, the opportunities to party were endless and, to Downey, irresistible.

. After Chaplin, the lack of serious roles would see Downey taking what work he could. The comedy Heart And Souls would see Charles Grodin, Tom Sizemore, Kyra Sedgwick and Alfre Woodard killed in an accident and return as angels to protect and nurture a young kid who survives. Years later they face a challenge when the child has grown into Downey, a ruthless yuppie bankruptcy specialist who's ill-treating girlfriend Elizabeth Shue (who'd earlier appeared in Soapdish). In order to save him from damnation they take it in turns to inhabit his body and make him do the right thing, Grodin forcing him to sing the National Anthem at a BB King concert, Woodard making him righteously sassy as an airport etc, Downey of course getting the chance to play five separate characters, two of them female. It was light and reasonably enjoyable stuff. Far heavier would be Robert Altman's Short Cuts, where a host of disconnected characters were drawn together by tragedy, hypocrisy and foolishness. Downey would play an adulterous make-up artist, married to Lili Taylor, looking after a neighbour's flat for a month and playing out their sexual fantasies in the guy's bed.

1994 would bring yet more ups and downs. First there'd be a cameo in the ill-conceived Hail Caesar, a favour for his friend Anthony Michael Hall, who directed and starred. Here Hall would play a wannabe rock star who accepts a bet from his rich girlfriend's dad - he can have her hand in marriage if he can earn $100,000 in six months. Downey would appear as a zany record producer, desperate to get into the industry proper. Following this he'd join former co-stars Tom Sizemore and Rodney Dangerfield, as well as Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis and Tommy Lee Jones, in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. Here Harrelson and Lewis would go on a cross-country murder spree, attempting to find fame as the new Bonnie and Clyde. The media hype them up, none more so than Downey, host of a TV tabloid show, who follows their every move, rejoicing in their horrible exploits and ignoring their victims. When they're caught and jailed, Downey remains fascinated by their fame and follows them, becoming involved in a deadly riot, as Stone satirised the media's obsession with crime. The year would end with Only You, directed by Norman Jewison, where Downey's Chaplin co-star Marisa Tomei would be convinced by a ouija board that she's destined to marry a man named Damon Bradley. After years of waiting, she gives up on her dream and gets engaged, only to skip the wedding when she hears one of the groom's friend, Damon Bradley, can't make the ceremony as he has to go to Venice. Off she shoots to Italy and meets Downey, the pair crossing many an obstacle (one being Billy Zane) before finally finding love.

With superb photography by Sven Nykvist and charming central performances, the film was terribly old-fashioned, but for all that a joy.

. 1995 was also lacking in the sort of stand-out leads that might've kept Downey on top. In Richard Loncraine's Richard III, where Ian McKellen would play the title role as a totalitarian dictator in the 1930s, Annette Bening would play the fearful wife of the dying king, with Downey as her wastrel brother. While McKellen murders his way to the crown, the decadent Downey revels in the luxury of the royal court, unaware of the impending danger till, while being serviced by a nubile blonde, he's impaled on a long blade in a killing worthy of Jason Voorhees. Richard III would see Downey credited alongside great Brit thespians like Nigel Hawthorne, Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent and Kristin Scott Thomas, and his next picture would see him amidst an equally starry cast - this time an American one - featuring Holly Hunter, Anne Bancroft, Charles Durning, David Strathairn, his Chaplin co-star Geraldine Chaplin, and Sam Slovich, a peer from his brief theatre days. This was Home For The Holidays, directed by Jodie Foster, a comedy drama concerning a Thanksgiving family reunion. While a recently sacked Hunter would endure interrogation from pushy mum Bancroft and mad aunt Chaplin mooned over her brother-in-law Durning, gay brother Downey would exercise his acerbic wit at the expense of sister Cynthia Stevenson and her dull husband Steve Guttenberg, dropping a turnkey on them and generally being such a pain that he ends up in a fight with Guttenberg on the lawn and has to be hosed. As it turns out, though, he's not the selfish dick he appears to be.

Having starred alongside Stockard Channing in Jim Henson's muppet short Mr Willowby's Christmas, where he'd battle with mice over a perfect tree, he'd move on to another Brit period drama, Restoration. Based on the novel by Rose Tremain, this would reunite him with his Soapdish director Michael Hoffman and Ian McKellen, and see him playing a physician in the 1600s who saves the dog of Sam Neil's Charles II and is invited into the extravagant post-Cromwell court. Here Neil sets him up with a knighthood and estate, but only on condition that he marries the king's mistress, Polly Walker, yet does not sleep with her. Unfortunately, Downey falls for Walker, leading him to be thrown from court and into poverty on London's filthy streets. This in turn leads him to wisdom and a change of fortune when plague and the Great Fire ravage the city. It was an impressive historical drama, far superior to Downey's next effort, Danger Zone, where his Only You co-star Billy Zane played an engineer running a mine in a troubled African state. When he's visited by old friend Downey, a mercenary in possession of what he claims is toxic waste, Zane's forced to deal with military attacks, eco-disasters and, eventually, a worldwide nuclear conspiracy.

As well as Danger Zone, 1997 would bring three other Downey releases. One Night Stand, directed by Mike Figgis, would bring another small but central role as Wesley Snipes, in New York to visit his HIV-Positive choreographer friend Downey, would sleep with stranger Nastassja Kinski. Returning a year later, with Downey now really ill, Snipes would be horrified to discover that Kinski is in fact the wife of Downey's brother, Kyle McLachlan. Warm and well-acted, the movie would be lifted emotionally by Downey's excellence as he kept his good humour in the face of approaching death. Beyond this, there'd be reunions with both his father and James Toback, who'd given him his first lead in The Pick-Up Artist. For his father, he'd join Sean Penn and Soapdish co-star Cathy Moriarty in the quirky rom-com Hugo Pool, where Alyssa Milano would play a pool cleaner dealing with a succession of odd clients, Downey Jr playing a hyperactive Dutch film director so intense he's killed one of his extras for overacting. Beyond looking for laughs, the film would also promote awareness of Lou Gehrig's Disease. In 1994 the condition had killed Laura Ernst, Downey Sr's partner, who'd helped get him off drugs and co-written several of his works, including this one. For Toback, Downey Jr would appear in the low-budget Two Girls And A Guy. Here he'd play a philandering screen actor returning to his Manhattan flat to be confronted by Heather Graham and Natasha Gregson Wagner, two of his regular girlfriends who've now found out about each other. Very wordy, reminiscent of a screened play and, like The Pick-Up Artist close to the heart of the promiscuous Toback, the film would see Downey desperately defending his behaviour, excusing his lies as the girls try to hold on to their anger.

. Two Girls And A Guy was filmed in only eleven days, and written in just four, Toback claiming he'd been inspired by seeing his friend Downey on TV. It wasn't a rerun of a movie he'd been watching, though, but a slice of real-life drama, Downey in handcuffs and an orange jump-suit, in danger of imminent incarceration. Of course, it was all about Downey's never-sated appetite for intoxicants. Though he'd always liked to get out of it, the fall-out had begun to worsen when, in 1995, he'd gravitated to crack and heroin, drugs so readily available that he could go out, score and be home again within 45 minutes. To pay for these excesses, as well as his family, he'd take any job going, later claiming to have not liked any of his recent work other than Home For The Holidays. Recognising that a great talent was going to waste, the ever-proactive Sean Penn, abetted by Dennis Quaid, smashed Downey's door in and kidnapped him, forcing him onto a private jet and taking him to rehab in the Sierra Tucson clinic in Arizona, the same clinic he'd attended for his cocaine problems in the late Eighties.

Just three days later, Downey would escape, hitch into town, call his accountant to arrange a flight and get hugely drunk on the plane home. Soon afterwards, he'd be stopped in his Porsche on Sunset Strip, the police noting that he was stark naked and throwing imaginary rats out of the car-window.

. Come June 23rd, 1996, it got worse when Downey was busted for speeding on the Pacific Coast Highway. In his Ford Explorer police found cocaine, heroin and a Magnum handgun. As it turned out, the gun was unloaded and Downey had a licence, but he was still in serious trouble. Even so, he could not control his intakes and just three weeks later, on July 16th, would come the infamous "Goldilocks" incident when Downey, out of his skull yet again, wandered into a neighbour's house, stripped down to his underwear, folded his clothes neatly on a chair, and went to sleep in the bed of the neighbour's eleven-year-old child. On the tape's of the mother's subsequent 911 call you can clearly hear Downey snoring in the background. Though the neighbour did not wish to press charges, probably recognising that there was nothing aggressive about Downey's intrusion, he'd still be busted for being under the influence of a controlled substance. Sent immediately to rehab, on the morning on Saturday, July 20th he'd escape through a bathroom window of the Exodus Recovery Centre in Marina Del Ray, dressed in his Hawaiian shirt and slippers, and hitch-hike to a friends' place in Malibu. He'd be tracked down and returned within four hours. On July 29th he'd be sent to a private rehab clinic. For all this, he'd be landed with a three year suspended sentence plus probation and drug counselling. His wife left him, he'd become a danger to himself and a risk to anyone who might employ him. To help him get back on the straight and narrow, he surrounded himself with sober assistants. On the set of Two Girls And A Guy he submitted to daily drug tests. He was clearly trying but, like his character in Less Than Zero, it seemed he had an innate wish to hit rock bottom. Later in 1997, having missed a mandatory drugs test, he'd be jailed for 113 days, at one point getting into a brawl and requiring minor plastic surgery on his face. On occasional breaks, he'd visit his father, the pair of them writing together.

As an aside, the Goldilocks incident mirrored one of Downey's father's experiences back in the Seventies. Utterly wasted, he would drive home at 3 o'clock one morning and wander into the house next door. There he would see his neighbour watching TV and try to silently back out of the room, fearing he'd be shot as an intruder. Without even turning around, the man would simply say to him "You never say hello", all of it a sad indictment of life in LA.

Downey Jr would be successful enough in his next attempt to stay straight, winning regular work over the next couple of years.

1998 would see him rejoin Robert Altman for the thriller The Gingerbread Man where high-powered lawyer Kenneth Branagh would begin an affair with caterer Embeth Davidtz, a woman seemingly being stalked by her own father, Robert Duvall. Branagh would hire private detective Downey to investigate the situation, a nice guy with a weakness for booze and women, and soon everyone's threatened by Duvall and his sinister right-wing friends. Altman would describe Downey as "America's best actor. I don't know anybody better". Following this would come US Marshals, a spin-off from The Fugitive, where one of Downey's former co-stars, Tommy Lee Jones, would hunt another, Wesley Snipes, Snipes possibly being one of America's most wanted killers. Naturally, the State Department become involved in the shape of agent Downey, who shadows Jones, Downey taking the usual jibes about being a white collar sissy as the pair indulge in macho sparring.

. If US Marshals was all-action, In Dreams would be far more artistic, featuring Downey's Richard III co-star Annette Bening as a suicidal mother tortured by terrible dreams and premonitions, her strange hallucinations featuring a town drowned in the making of a reservoir and a serial killer threatening children. While director Neil Jordan is dealing with Bening's madness, the film is beautiful and decidedly creepy, sadly slipping somewhat when the dreams become real and Bening's own child is menaced by the killer, a bearded, bug-eyed and defiantly OTT Downey. In Dreams was thus a rarity in that it got worse when Downey showed up on screen.

Downey would again go over the top in his next appearance, but this time with some justification. In Friends & Lovers, a group of 20-somethings, including Stephen Baldwin, Alison Eastwood and Claudia Schiffer, would holiday in a ski chalet, the film rather crudely examining adult relationships. Downey, meanwhile, would add humour as a German ski instructor, complete with thick accent and rolling eyes. There'd be another comic cameo in Steve Martin's Bowfinger, where wannabe director Martin would fail to persuade film star Eddie Murphy to appear in his new movie and attempt, by using a lookalike (Murphy again) to shoot his movie guerrilla-style, including film star Murphy without his knowledge. Downey would appear as a powerful studio executive Martin attempts to schmooze in a restaurant, reacting with quiet amusement when he notices a wire hanging from Martin's mobile when he's pretending to make an important call, Martin having just torn the phone from his car in the vain hope of impressing Downey. Also featuring would be Terence Stamp and Heather Graham, Downey's co-star in Two Girls And A Guy.

Downey's final release of 1999 would see him reunite with James Toback (as well as Ben Stiller and Claudia Schiffer) for Black And White, a film that some claimed to merely be about white New York kids wanting to be black but in fact contains a welter of subjects and ideas, including music, corruption, gambling, bribery, family, murder and straight and gay sexuality. It was rough but fascinating, with Downey standing out as the gay husband of documentary maker Brooke Shields. As the truth of his sexuality becomes inescapable, he tries to tell her. He also, in one of contemporary cinema's more bizarre moments, comes on to fearsome boxer Mike Tyson, daring to utter the line "In the dream, you were holding me". As much of Black And White was improvised, much credit should go to both Downey and Tyson for creating such a memorable scene.

. If Chaplin ended a chapter in Downey's career, confirming the promise he'd shown before, then his next picture, Wonder Boys, would bring another to a close - the troubled 1990s. Directed by Curtis Hanson, the film would see Michael Douglas as a college professor and author, dumped by his wife, engaged in an affair with chancellor Frances McDormand, and suffering from writer's block as he's smoking too much dope. Also on the scene are students Katie Holmes, who fancies him, and Tobey Maguire, a compulsive liar who draws Douglas even further into chaos. Downey would play Douglas's editor, pretending to be in town for a literary festival but really checking on his client's slow progress. A touchy and worldly-wise bisexual, he arrives with a transvestite in tow, but soon dumps him in pursuit of Maguire. Wonder Boys would make no money, but would be a critical success.

However it wasn't either of these facts that made the movie important to Downey. More crucial to him was that during filming he suffered a relapse, falling back into drugs. Missing more compulsory tests, he'd be arrested again and sent to rehab in LA County Jail, awaiting a hearing on August 5th. At that hearing, Malibu Judge Lawrence Mira would conclude that Downey could not or would not take responsibility for refraining from drug and alcohol use on his own. Therefore the three-year suspended sentence he'd received back in 1996 was invoked and Downey, now Department of Corrections Number P50522, would spend two weeks in the state prison reception centre at Wasco, California, for orientation, then be transferred to the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility in Corcoran, across the road from the notorious Corcoran prison. When pleading for clemency, Downey seemed to recognise his situation, saying "It's like I have a shotgun in my mouth, I've got my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of gun-metal". Sharing a cell with five others, he'd be woken at 6am each day to work in the kitchens, also receiving drug counselling for a further four hours a day.

Due to the time Downey had spent in locked-down rehab units and in pre-sentence confinement, he'd be released in August, 2000.

. One day after his release, the cavalry would arrive in the shape of David E Kelley, offering Downey a half a million dollars to appear as Calista Flockhart's love interest in eight episodes of the hit TV show Ally McBeal. After three successful seasons, the show's ratings had begun to fall and Downey was to be its saviour. So well did this work that his contract would stretch to 15 episodes, with Flockhart and Downey standing against each other in court, Flockhart dealing with Downey's ex Famke Janssen (earlier his co-star in The Gingerbread Man), Flockhart helping Downey's son to sue him, Downey defending Sting when a man accusing him of ruining his marriage (Downey would also sing with Sting in that episode, an improvement from the day, years before, when he had to serve him with peppermint tea) - the usual McBeal weirdness. With the show reignited by Downey's presence, Kelley planned to have Flockhart and Downey marry in the season finale, a neat notion as they were now a couple in real life.

During his last excursion into drugs, Downey had lost the lot. His lifestyle and, of course, his legal fees had cost him his car and his Malibu home. Yet, even having been given this lifeline by Kelley, a way back to fame and fortune, Downey could not stay straight. In November, 2000, just a few months after his release from jail, he'd be arrested again at the plush Merv Griffin resort in Palm Springs. There to celebrate Thanksgiving weekend, Downey had picked up cocktail waitress Kiley Ridge and hung out with some local drinkers. Someone, unfortunately, called 911, saying there was a man in Room 311 with drugs and a gun. The police arrived to find four grams of cocaine and sixteen Valium, but no guns. Co-operating fully, begging the officers to give him a break as he knew what this meant, Downey was arrested and spent the night in jail, the next day being released on $15,000 bail. Quickly he'd be sacked from Ally McBeal, despite the protestations of David E Kelley who understood the effect Downey had had (the last show in the season would still be called the Wedding, even though the wedding story had been scrapped, and Downey would win a Golden Globe and be Emmy-nominated for the work he'd already done). A plan to play Hamlet on an LA stage the following January, under the direction of his old pal Mel Gibson, was also nixed. And he'd lose Flockhart to Harrison Ford.

Had he hit rock bottom? Not quite. In 2001 he'd be found wandering in a Los Angeles alleyway and again arrested for being under the influence of a controlled substance. He'd also face charges for the incident at the Merv Griffin resort. Pleading not guilty, he'd still be held in drug rehab till the hearing on July 16th. Then he'd plead no contest and be sent to rehab for a further year, plus three more years' probation.

Languishing in Wavelengths International, the court-ordered treatment centre, he was pretty well finished. Homeless, nearly bankrupt and with no hope of proper employment. No insurance company would touch him. He'd be allowed out for a single day to film a video for Elton John, I Want Love, directed by Sam Taylor-Wood, but this simply brought yet more controversy (in 2002 Downey and Taylor-Wood would work together on an art video forming part of Taylor-Wood's Mute exhibition).

. Luckily for Downey, his old pal Mel Gibson turned out to be a friend, indeed. While Downey was incarcerated, Gibson dropped off a script he was producing, a new version of Dennis Potter's classic The Singing Detective. Gibson would cover the insurance problem by personally vouching for Downey. It would prove to be a positive turning-point.

Upon his release, Downey would appear in two short movies. The first, Lethargy, would be a dark comedy concerning a lazy teen played by David Gelb, given advice on how to live by store clerk Edward Burns and animal therapist Downey. The second would be a far more substantial affair. This was Whatever We Do, written by Nick Cassavetes and produced by Downey's Wonder Boys co-star Tobey Maguire. Here Tim Roth and Amanda Peet would play a newly engaged couple interrupted by the arrival of Roth's old drinking buddy Downey and his girlfriend Zooey Deschanel. Downey would be flash and aggressive, trying to borrow thousands from Roth and trying it on with Peet, eventually revelling in the hurtful revelation that he and Peet were once lovers. He seems a monster, bringing only pain to his so-called friend, but then we see the twisted way he shows a very real love.

Now would come The Singing Detective. Directed by Downey's Back To School room-mate Keith Gordon, this would see Downey take the place of Michael Gambon as novelist Dan Dark, wracked by dreadful psoriasis, boiling with anger, frustration and resentment and drifting into hallucinations, his past, present and fiction blending into one. Often the cast would burst into song as Downey was pursued by thugs Adrien Brody and Jon Polito, questioned by Gibson's comical therapist and, in one hilarious scene, desperately tries to maintain control as nurse Katie Holmes, another co-star from Wonder Boys, rubs ointment into his groin. Downey would be dapper as his own fictional detective, on the smug side of cool, and deal with the musical numbers well. He'd also impress as the bed-bound patient, firing off insolent and sarcastic wisecracks. He did, though, lack Gambon's seething rage, and Gordon would admit that it was difficult to get Downey to summon anger. He is not, by nature, an angry person, more a showbiz kinda guy, as he proved by crooning over the credits to The Singing Detective.

Of course, Gibson would not be able to vouch for Downey on all his projects. For his next, Gothika, he would have to put his entire salary up against the insurance costs. It would be worth it.

Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz, hot after French hit The Crimson Rivers, the movie would be an effective psycho-thriller where prison psychiatrist Halle Berry, just married to boss Charles S Dutton, would suffer a car crash and wake to find herself a patient in her own institution. She remembers nothing but apparently Dutton is dead and she did it, the plot thickening as many other possible suspects are revealed, one being Downey, a co-worker who loves her and resented her marriage, all of it leading most enjoyably to ropes, torture and satanic secrets. Very different would be Eros, a collection of three short and supposedly erotic tales by Antonioni, Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kar-Wai. The first, Kar-Wai's The Hand, involving a long unrequited love affair between Chang Chen's tailor and Gong Li's whore, would be beautiful, touching and sexy. Downey would appear in Soderbergh's contribution, playing a fast-talking, sensitive and seemingly gullible fellow explaining his erotic dream to therapist Alan Arkin, slapstick humour dominating as Arkin attempts to send a message by paper plane through the window in the background. Then suddenly the story is turned on its head and we see the real reality, the tale being less a piece of erotica than a very arty and vaguely annoying Tale of the Unexpected. Antonioni's effort, meanwhile, is dull and comically duff, revealing the director to still be trapped in the 1960s.

. At last things were looking up for Downey. On the set of Gothika he'd met producer Susan Levin and the couple would marry in 2005. Straightforward and ambitious, Levin would have no truck with drugs. Downey had to make a choice and was at last ready to make the right one. Coincidentally, encouraged by Levin, in 2004 he'd released an album, titled The Futurist and containing a raft of self-penned songs, some dealing with the other times he'd been faced with a choice between and loving relationship or a life on drugs. In writing these lyrics, of course, Sarah Jessica Parker would dominate his thoughts. As an album it was soft, slightly jazzy and possessed some genuinely catchy tunes. It also featured cover art by Downey, proof that, when firing on all cylinders, he is a true Renaissance Man.

2005 would see Downey again up and running. First would come Game 6, written by Don De Lillo and directed by Michael Hoffman, who'd earlier overseen Downey in Soapdish and Restoration. Here Michael Keaton would play a playwright whose new work is opening on the same night as his beloved Boston Red Sox hope to win the World Series of 1986. Keaton, cheating on his wife with investor Bebe Neuwirth, is convinced the Sox will bring him bad luck again and discusses the prospect with fellow writer Griffin Dunne, who'd two decades earlier co-produced Downey's Baby It's You.

For his part, Dunne is convinced that his life has been ruined by arch-critic Downey and Keaton fears similar treatment, Downey pulling out the stops as their affected, paranoid and guru-like nemesis, who lives in hiding and attends premieres in disguise. Following this would come the more up-tempo Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, the directorial debut of Shane Black, writer of such action hits as The Long Kiss Goodnight, The Last Boy Scout and Lethal Weapon. Here Downey would pay a New York sneak thief who's mistaken for an actor and is taken to LA for a screen test. While there, he gets involved in a kidnap/murder case involving his childhood love Michelle Monaghan and super-efficient gay detective Val Kilmer. Downey pretends to be a private dick, too, in order to impress Monaghan and takes almighty physical punishment as he's shot, beaten up, pistol-whipped and tortured with electrodes to the genitals as they close in on the truth. The film was flashy in its style, sometimes stopping dead to have Downey explain the plot, and switching bravely between cartoon violence and some truly disturbing material. Downey would be particularly funny throughout, his character being a bit of a dimwit, his efforts to be tough usually ending disastrously and his successes met with a con man's smirk of triumph. As with The Singing Detective, Downey would sing over the credits to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, this time delivering the song Broken from his own album.

. The year would end with another success, George Clooney's Good Night, And Good Luck, where David Strathairn, one of Downey's co-stars in Home For The Holidays, would play broadcaster Edward R Murrow, bravely taking on Senator Joseph McCarthy over his anti-Communist witch hunts. In keeping with the atmosphere of oppression, secrecy and fear, Downey and Patricia Clarkson would play employees of Murrow's own company, CBS News, forced to keep their marriage quiet to avoid the sack.

2006 would bring another rush of releases as the sober Downey made up for lost time. Lending his voice to the animated TV comedy Family Guy, he'd play Lois's long-lost brother whom she rescues from a mental institution. Soon, though, someone begins to strangle all the fat guys in Quahog. Also cartoonish would be The Shaggy Dog, a remake of the 1959 original, where Downey would use a Tibetan hound in research intended to uncover the secret of long life. Unfortunately, DA Tim Allen is bitten by the dog and begins to exhibit canine characteristics, though his antics are subdued next to a wildly twitching Downey's crazy speeches and he plays the mad professor to the hilt. There'd also be cartoon qualities to Downey's next picture, A Scanner Darkly, which would be shot in live action by director Richard Linklater then animated. Based on a Philip K Dick story, the film would see Keanu Reeves leading a double life as an undercover cop and a junkie addicted to powerful new drug Substance D.

As a cop he'd romance dealer Winona Ryder, Downey's co-star 18 years before in 1969, hoping to unearth her supplier. As a junkie, he'd share a home with fellow addicts Rory Cochrane, Downey's Natural Born Killers co-star Woody Harrelson and Downey, again going for comedy as he's high as a kite and wholly paranoid, eventually grassing up Reeves, not realising that the cop he's grassing to is Reeves himself.

. The year would continue with the oddity Fur: An Imaginary Portrait Of Diane Arbus, where Nicole Kidman would be wealthy by birth and married to a commercial photographer but lacking in fulfilment. Her interest is piqued by a new upstairs neighbour, the mysterious Downey who's at first wrapped up like the Invisible Man, then revealed to be hirsute beyond reason. With Downey forced to act only with his eyes and voice, a relationship begins between them that awakens the artist within Arbus and leads her into a photographic career of her own. Interestingly, the real-life Arbus's husband had been Allan Arbus, who'd played the Christ figure alongside Downey in his father's Greaser's Palace back in 1972. Beyond this, Downey's grandmother Betty had once been photographed by Diane Arbus. Downey's prolific year would end with Dito Montiel's A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints where Downey would play an author, successful after penning the autobiographical tome of the title, who returns home to Queens and his troubled family life. With Downey narrating the bridges, the film would flash back to 1986 when the young Downey, played by Shia LaBeouf would have to make a choice between loyalty to his gang member friends and a possible new life suggested to him by poetry.

The next year would bring more variety with a further three releases. First would come David Fincher's Zodiac, set in the Sixties and Seventies and concerning the hunt for the Zodiac killer in San Francisco who, though sending taunting messages to the police, was never caught. Jake Gyllenhaal would play a new cartoonist on the San Francisco Chronicle, who becomes fascinated with the case and joins Downey's ace reporter in the hunt. A heavy drinker and smoker, Downey would be a flamboyant maverick, an important addition to what was essentially a character movie. We all knew the ending but, as with All The President's Men, it was still a thrilling ride. Less successful would be Lucky You where Eric Bana, needing money, would work towards entering the World Series of Poker and a confrontation with his estranged gambler father, Robert Duvall, Downey's co-star in The Gingerbread Man. Downey himself would pop up in a pointless cameo as a phone scam artist, a friend Bana asks for money. Far meatier for Downey would be Charlie Bartlett, where Anton Yelchin would pay a rich but troubled kid, expelled from every private school in the state and eventually sent by mum Hope Davis to a local public school.

Here, in an effort to become popular quickly, he begins to deal Ritalin to his peers and comes into conflict with alcoholic principal Downey, matters getting worse when Yelchin begins to date Downey's daughter. Though a teen comedy, it needed to be taken seriously and Downey did that, floundering brilliantly as his authority crumbled.

. 2008 would, after all his troubles, at last see Downey return to the Hollywood heights. During the recent glut of comic book adaptations, it had been noted that the movies had often been lent weight by the introduction of heavyweight thespians. Patrick Stewart and Downey's Richard III co-star Ian McKellen had certainly boosted the X-Men franchise. Eric Bana and Edward Norton had both added emotional impact to The Hulk. So it wasn't much of a stretch for director Jon Favreau and his producers to decide on Downey to play Tony Stark, the playboy industrialist who builds himself a super-suit and decides to save the world as Iron Man (this was actually Downey's first screen test since Chaplin). Of course Downey was excellent in playboy mode, fully understanding the ways of the arrogant, womanising boozer, and he received his epiphany well before taking on the might of mentor Jeff Bridges' evil Iron Monger. The film would be a rip-roaring success, breaking the $300 million barrier at the US box office.

Having popped up, again as Stark, at the beginning of Norton's Hulk effort, Downey would then move on to Tropic Thunder, a comedy written and directed by Ben Stiller, who'd appeared alongside Downey in Black and White and, way back, in That's Adequate. A spoof of Apocalypse Now and Platoon, this would see a big-budget war movie being shot in the jungle, with Stiller as a hunky movie star, Jack black as a crass comedian and Downey as an Australian thespian, a multi-Oscar winner with his brain frazzled by years of method acting. Playing the black commander of the unit, he's gone through skin colouration for the role and will not drop it, even off camera. When an Asian drug lord comes to believe that the actors are in fact DEA agents, they're suddenly involved in a real war, director Steve Coogan deciding to shoot them guerrilla-style for added authenticity. Also featuring Tom Cruise, Nick Nolte and Downey's Wonder Boys co-star Tobey Maguire, the film would be one of Stiller's stronger efforts, Downey being especially funny, particularly in his dealings with rapper-turned-actor Brandon T Jackson. Indeed, Downey would find himself nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA. He'd also join Stiller and Black on the hugely popular American Idol, the three of them playing the Pips behind Gladys Knight. Far more serious would be Joe Wright's The Soloist, the true story of musical prodigy Nathaniel Ayers, played by Jamie Foxx, who dropped out of Juilliard with schizophrenia and wound up giving violin and cello recitals on the streets of LA.

Downey would play a dissolute journalist who tries to help him and writes a series of articles highlighting the plight of LA's homeless. From here he'd move on to Guy Ritchie's action-packed update of Sherlock Holmes, Downey playing Holmes to Jude Law's Watson. No longer an effete, drug-addled boffin, Holmes would here be seen as a buff-bodied hero, a master of martial arts, sword-fighting and bare-knuckle boxing.

. It's been a long, strange trip for Robert Downey Jr. Once describing himself as "the poster boy for pharmaceutical mismanagement" he's made it back to the top. With his addictions, hopefully, conquered, he can now concentrate fully on his work and become what many have long hoped he would be - one of the greatest actors in cinema history.

Dominic Wills