11 h 5 min, 18 juill. 2020 ans - THE TIMES Who is Amber Heard? The unlikely journey of Johnny Depp’s ex‑wife from smalltown America to the High Court

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Who is Amber Heard? The unlikely journey of Johnny Depp’s ex‑wife from smalltown America to the High Court

How the tomboy daughter of a Texan builder became a star in this summer’s legal blockbuster

By Rosie Kinchen

Amber Heard has always been trying to see how far she can get, how fast. The actress admits it herself: “A horse became a bike, a bike became a car, a car became a plane,” she joked five years ago. To read the headlines that have come out of the High Court in the past two weeks, it’s pretty clear that at some point Heard lost control.

So far, the details from the libel trial brought by her ex-husband, Johnny Depp, against News Group Newspapers, parent company of The Sun (the tabloid’s executive editor, Dan Wootton, is also a co-defendant) and part of the same stable as The Sunday Times, include the allegations that she “stole” her former assistant’s story of violent rape to use for her own advantage in the trial, that she threw a bottle at Depp, severing the top of his finger during a row (his former estate manager later found the fingertip) and that she once defecated in the marital bed, leading to the dangerously catchy nickname “Amber Turd”.

The whole thing is such a circus of absurdity that every time she arrives at court, glossy and defiant, one wonders why she bothers. Heard is merely a witness in the trial and could have testified by video link. One media lawyer likened it to the big libel trials of the mid-1990s: an opportunity to win hearts as well as minds. If that’s the case, Heard has a job on her hands. Depp is Edward Scissorhands, he is Gilbert Grape, he is Captain Jack Sparrow. Whether it’s because of sexism or talent, Heard is a Hollywood whisper, a curiously empty slate.

She grew up in the city of Manor, Texas (population: 13,400), but was always set on escape. Her father, David, ran a building company. Her mother, Paige, worked as an internet researcher. They had three daughters but Amber, the middle child, was treated like a son by her father.

“I was very girlie on the inside, but my dad was not raising a girlie girl. He was raising someone who could keep up with him,” she said in an interview. She went hunting and fishing with him and she and her younger sister would eat what he shot: venison, quail, duck, pheasant. “My dad taught me to break horses and he’d yell at me, ‘Don’t be such a pussy!’ I was like, ‘Dad, I’m eight,’” she once said.

For a free-spirited child, Manor was a claustrophobic place. Heard was raised a Catholic but declared herself to be an atheist after her friend died in a car crash when she was 16. She remembers feeling “electrified” the first time she saw a Muslim woman wearing a hijab in the street. She got her first job at 13, lying about her age so she could work as a lifeguard, and started saving up to leave.

At 16 she paid for headshots to be taken and sent them to New York modelling agencies, moving to the city the following year. “I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” she said about the moment she arrived there. Modelling, on the other hand, she loathed.

In 2004 she had her first acting role — in the American football drama Friday Night Lights — and from there the credits started building up. She played the younger version of Charlize Theron’s character in the sexual discrimination drama North Country and took the lead in the 2006 slasher thriller All the Boys Love Mandy Lane. Her acting was passable; it was her beauty that made her stand out.

The director Tom Hooper cast her as the Danish ballerina Ulla Poulsen in The Danish Girl, his 2015 film about one of the first people to undergo gender reassignment, Lili Elbe, played by Eddie Redmayne. Hooper wanted the role to be played by someone who captures “the quintessence of feminine and of course that person is very hard to find. In Amber I had found my idea of feminine beauty. She’s breathtaking.”

She was developing an image as a fast-living, fast-drinking wild child. She came out as bisexual and had a relationship with the photographer Tasya van Ree. In 2009 she was arrested for a domestic violence misdemeanour against van Ree, but the charge was dropped.

Several times it looked as if her career was about to take off, but somehow it never quite did. One of these moments was when she was cast opposite Depp in The Rum Diary, based on a novel by Depp’s hero, the gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson.

They started shooting in 2009 and although the film flopped, their relationship blossomed. The pair starting dating in 2012 after Depp split from his long-term partner, Vanessa Paradis. They were married on the actor’s private island in the Bahamas three years later (after an official ceremony in Los Angeles) and she moved into his LA home.

Heard described their living arrangement as a kind of “punk-rock Friends” — her younger sister moved in next door and her best friend across the way. She also became a stepmother to Depp’s then 15-year-old daughter, Lily-Rose, and 12-year-old son, Jack, describing it as “an honour and the greatest, most surprising gift I have ever received in my life”. Despite this apparent happiness, her actress friend Olivia Wilde observed that Heard had been thrust into “someone else’s spotlight”. Her own career hadn’t moved an inch.

She played the female lead opposite Nicolas Cage in 2011’s Drive Angry, which also flopped. She was then cast in an adaptation of London Fields, Martin Amis’s pre-millennial noir, which began filming in 2013. It was a disaster. The producers sued Heard for $10m claiming, among other things, that she had breached her contract by refusing to perform certain “acting services”. Heard countersued, accusing them of using a body double to make it appear that she had starred in sex scenes she hadn’t consented to. The film was finally released in America in October 2018, when it had the second-worst opening weekend of all time for a movie on general release. Heard was nominated for a Golden Raspberry award for worst actress.

The continued focus on her beauty, which had been her ticket out of Texas, was now a source of resentment. She yearned for credibility, just as Marilyn Monroe had done 60 years earlier.

For Monroe the solution was an intellectual man, Arthur Miller. For Heard it was rare books, which she collected and talked about at some length. In every city she visited, she reportedly tried to find a copy of the Persian poetry collection the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, she told interviewers. She has a line from it tattooed in Farsi on her torso (the meaning was “personal”, she said). In one interview she was reading Herodotus and Blueprint for Revolution by Srdja Popovic and Matthew Miller. In another it was biographies of Cleopatra and the Romanovs.

When she was interviewed by The Sunday Times in 2018, she started playing Arabic music she had heard while visiting the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan and talked about a girl she had met there who was terrified about an operation on a cleft lip. Struck by her lack of self-awareness, the interviewer asked if she had felt uncomfortable being there.

“No,” Heard replied. “Even though I didn’t come from a privileged background by American standards, I have had incredible luck and we are all burdened by it. I don’t feel embarrassed about it. Do something about it, is what I would say.”

Since her marriage to Depp broke down in 2016, she has been romantically linked to the British model turned actress Cara Delevingne and the billionaire tech pioneer Elon Musk. Her mother died suddenly earlier this year.

According to people in the film industry, this trial could spell the end of Heard’s screen career: it will be difficult to insure her on set. She was once asked if she was motivated by acting or a desire to flee Texas. “Both,” she said. “I have a love-hate relationship with [acting], still to this day. But I was determined to do something and to see something and to use my voice. And to experience as much of the world as I could. When I was in Texas, people would say, “Don’t do this — it’s crazy.’ I didn’t have anything to lose. I didn’t care.”

Whatever you make of the claims and counterclaims, for the then 30-year-old actress to take on a Hollywood megastar was a punchy move. She accused Depp of domestic violence and of being drunk and high on drugs throughout their relationship and received a $7m divorce settlement, which she pledged to charity.

Perhaps she thought this case would be another Harvey Weinstein moment, a rallying cry against domestic abuse. But the petty bickering and vile insults against a backdrop of private jets and Caribbean islands don’t feel like a watershed moment so much as a tragic mess.

Drive Angry, 2011
It’s hard to pick holes in the plot: Nicolas Cage breaks out of hell to wreak vengeance on a Satanic cult, with fast cars, in 3D. The main thing the New York Times critic seemed to notice about Heard’s performance as a “hard-luck waitress” was her “very short denim shorts”.

The Rum Diary, 2011
Where Amber met Johnny. For a change, Heard plays the “sexy blonde girlfriend” in this adaptation of a long-lost Hunter S Thompson novel that Depp persuaded the writer, an old pal, to finish. “On this evidence,” wrote Cosmo Landesman in The Sunday Times, “the book should have stayed in the basement.”

London Fields, 2018
“Aggressively awful”, “Quite simply horrendous”, critics said. Nevertheless Heard was nominated for an award for her turn as the femme fatale Nicola Six: a Golden Raspberry for worst actress.

Aquaman, 2018
A soggy superhero film in which Heard plays Mera, with, The Times said, “dyed red hair, a spangly green bodysuit and no discernible character traits other than flirting”.

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