Thursday Minute
No. 30 | February 11, 2010

Talkin’ ‘Bout “D” Generation

Our theme this week
Actors of the “D” Generation

Featured this week
Monday         —   Matt Damon
Tuesday         —   Matt Dillon
Wednesday    —   Leonardo DiCaprio

Robert Downey Jr.

The essentials
Robert Downey Jr. grew up in the movie business.  His father is an actor, writer, director, and producer, best known for the satire Putney Swope.  The younger Downey is best known for his acting, and his career has followed a classic three-act Hollywood story:  rise, fall, and comeback.

Robert Downey Jr. was, for a brief time in the mid-1980s, a member of the cast of Saturday Night Live.  He made his name, though, in films.  After several small roles he had his first lead role opposite Molly Ringwald in James Toback’s romantic comedy The Pick-up Artist (1987).   He played an addict living in the fast lane in Less Than Zero, adapted from the hit Bret Easton Ellis novel, and won praise for his performance.  With obvious parallels to his own life, he said “the role was like the ghost of Christmas Future.”  That success led to roles in some bigger-budget movies—Air America (1990), Soapdish (1991)—and finally to the lead in Chaplin (1992).  Downey’s performance in the Richard Attenborough biopic earned raves from critics and an Academy Award nomination.  Playing the film icon Charlie Chaplin was a risky move, but Downey pulled it off splendidly.  Other notable films followed.  He was part of the great ensemble in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993).  He played the journalist who makes heroes of the mass murderers in Natural Born Killers (1994).  In 1995 he did Shakespeare (Richard III) and, appearing with Holly Hunter, was the gay brother in Jodie Foster’s dysfunctional family comedy Home for the Holidays.

Downey was getting the wrong kind of headlines during the late ’90s.  His drug addiction was out of control, and for a while he had trouble finding work.  James Toback cast the troubled star in a couple of films.  Downey was a liar and good at it in Two Girls and a Guy (1997), and he appeared in Black and White (1999).  Still too big a risk, he couldn’t get bonded and missed a chance to be in Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda in 2000.  Mel Gibson helped Downey get back into movies, paying the bond for his friend on The Singing Detective (2003).  Downey starred in the dark crime comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in 2005, and in a supporting role in the retro news pic Good Night, and Good Luck.  The animated A Scanner Darkly (2006) followed, then David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), one of the outstanding crime dramas of the decade.

Downey had a great year at the box office in 2008:  as the superhero in the blockbuster Iron Man, and as an Academy Award-winning method actor in the satire Tropic Thunder, for which Downey won an Oscar nomination himself.  He played an L.A. Times reporter in The Soloist (2009) and then the lead in Sherlock Holmes (2009); a far cry from Basil Rathbone, Downey won a Golden Globe.  A sequel to Iron Man is in the works.

Beyond the final credits
Partners in crime (frequent collaborators):

• 3 films — Anthony Michael Hall, James Toback
• 2 films — Geraldine Chaplin, Mel Gibson, Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline, Matthew Modine, Ellisabeth Shue, Tom Sizemore, Wesley Snipes, James Spader

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Chaplin (1992)
Robert Downey Jr., Dan Aykroyd

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Zodiac (2007)
Robert Downey Jr., Jake Gyllenhaal

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Two Girls and a Guy (1997)
Robert Downey Jr., Heather Graham, Natasha Gregson Wagner

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Point of View
“There’s a fine line between the method actor and the schizophrenic.”
—Nicolas Cage

…58…59…60.