Robert Downey, Jr. is at the top of his game. He’s the highest-paid actor not just in Hollywood but the world — he made $80 million last year, according to Forbes. His Iron Man role is still in full swing — the next appearance is in Captain America: Civil War, now filming in Berlin, Germany, and Atlanta, Georgia, for release in 2016. And he’s sober, having kicked alcohol, cocaine, and heroin.
This talented actor has been making movies since 1970, when he was five years old. His first memorable appearance was as a smart-aleck bully in the John Hughes-directed classic ’80s high school flick Weird Science.
He’s brought his A-game before. The man received an Oscar nomination for his performance as silent-film comedian Charlie Chaplin in the 1992 film Chaplin.
But there have been many significant bumps along the road.
“Taking drugs to me is like having a shotgun in my mouth with my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal,” Downey told a judge in 1999.
Although Downey denies being bipolar, there is some evidence that he may have the disorder. In a People magazine article from December of 2000 titled “Bad to Worse,” Downey’s stepmother alleges her stepson is indeed bipolar.
“He’s gotten no help for that,” Rosemary Rogers Downey told People. “It’s the reason he has a hard time staying sober. What hasn’t been tried is medication and intensive psychotherapy.”
LA psychiatrist Dr. Manijeh Nikakhtar is the author of Addiction or Self-Medication? The Truth. According to the People story, she says she received a letter from Downey asking for advice while he was imprisoned in 1999. She told the magazine that no one had done a complete psychiatric evaluation on Downey. “I asked him flat out if he thought he was bipolar, and he said, ‘Oh yeah. There are times I spend a lot of money and I’m hyperactive, and there are other times I’m down.'”
Downey rarely speaks about his addiction, but he’s had quite the bad rep.
Around 1996 through 2001, he was arrested at least five times for possession of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana. He went to rehab unsuccessfully several times.
There was an incident in 1996 in which the actor was found passed out at his neighbor’s house in an 11-year-old boy’s bed, stripped down to his underwear.
Last year, he told Vanity Fair that the incident was “an uncommon occurrence for me. Happened to be a very public one. I was not a guy who blacked out.”
His rap sheet reads like a not-so-common criminal.
Speeding down Sunset Boulevard in possession of cocaine, heroin, and an unloaded gun in 1996, Downey was stopped by police and sentenced to three years’ probation and intermittent drug testing. In 1997, he missed one of those tests and was sent to Los Angeles County Jail for six months.
More arrests for possession and he was sent to serve a three-year term at the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison in Corcoran. He was released on $5,000 bail in 2000, when he took on the role of the new love interest of Calista Flockhart on the hit Fox TV show Ally McBeal.
Soon after he was fired from the show, prompting producers to scramble to rewrite his character out of the plotline, after another possession arrest. Another round of rehab and a three-year probation followed.
A newly sober Downey, who would relapse later, reflected on his addiction in in 1997. “I don’t discount the fact that addiction or alcoholism is a disease. But I still feel that, at every turn, I was choosing to keep going with it,” he said in the interview. “I guess the issue for me is to keep things dynamic.”
Things are quite dynamic now. Downey is savoring the sober life and witnessing the miracle of recovery.
“All those years of snorting coke, and then I accidentally get involved in heroin after smoking crack for the first time. It finally tied my shoelaces together,” Downey told Rolling Stone in 2010. “Smoking dope and smoking coke, you are rendered defenseless. The only way out of that hopeless state is intervention.”
After appearing successfully in several indie movies, including A Scanner Darkly and Good Night and Good Luck, in the summer of 2008, Downey came back with a vengeance as the billionaire playboy superhero Tony Stark in Iron Man.
The film grossed $585 million worldwide at the box office, signaling a major comeback for the actor.
I’ve never relapsed — knock on wood — but I admire Robert Downey, Jr.’s determination. He fought and fought and fought, rehab after rehab after rehab, to stay sober, and now he’s living the good life.
He’s in therapy. Attends 12-step meetings. And regularly meditates. He’s also taken up the martial art of Wing Chun Kung Fu. Now the hardest drink he imbibes is espresso.
“I used to say that I’d welcome a bullet to the forehead if I ever ended up as a fortysomething, remarried, marketable, big-action movie dad living in a cozy, cul-de-sac in suburban LA,” Downey told Live! Magazine. “Now I am that guy!”
