The Battered Lives of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard

It is no secret that the lives of Hollywood actors tend not to move along normal lines. All too often, with great star-power comes great irresponsibility. The list of those who were “larger than life” unfurls like those production credits that keep on rolling long after the audience has left the cinema.

But nothing, surely, can compare to the married life of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.

As a drama, their story would be perfect for daytime television, to be scheduled after Days of Our Lives and before Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. As a Hollywood movie, however, it probably wouldn’t get made: too tawdry, too over the top, too exaggerated to be believable.

Besides, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had already been made, and Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor famously reprised its theme in their real-life melodrama, described by Woman’s Day magazine as “one of the most publicised and turbulent love stories of all time … a love that was deep and fierce, the kind of love that can often be as destructive as it is beautiful.”

Except for the beautiful part, this could have been the template for the marriage of Depp and Heard. What a pair! The newly-weds from Hell. The only mystery is that they didn’t arm themselves with axes and pump-action shotguns in a fight to the death outside Mann’s Chinese Theater.

The good news, before this month, was that they both got out alive and were able to divorce, thus freeing themselves to resume what passes in the movie world as “normal” lives. Depp agreed to pay Heard $7 million (which she immediately donated to charity) and dropped his claim to custody of their two dogs, Pistol and Boo, as well as a horse called Arrow. He retained ownership of his homes in Los Angeles and Paris, his collection of classic cars and his private island in the Bahamas. The two then issued a statement in which they acknowledged that while their relationship had been “intensely passionate,” it was also, at times, “volatile”.

So much so Hollywood. It might have been supposed that that would be that, save perhaps for recurring diary items in the tabloids and an entertaining chapter or two in their memoirs.

But no.

Instead, for reasons that defy all rational analysis, Depp – the star of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Nightmare on Elm Street and, most famously, Pirates of the Caribbean (to say nothing of the  2005 hit, Corpse Bride) – chose to sue The Sun for depicting him as a “wife-beater” and, you might say, a bit of a nutter.

His ex, meanwhile – noted for her roles in Zombieland, 3 Days to Kill, Machete Kills and, in London Fields, a young woman who fears she is about to be murdered by a psychopathic lover, rose at once to the challenge. She didn’t have to be there. She could have stayed away. She could have chosen to be Heard but not seen. But she wasn’t having any of that. Sweeping into London as a wronged woman, she was clearly determined to extract whatever pound of flesh remained on the bones of her relationship with Depp, regardless of the cost to her own reputation.

By the mid-point of the case, heard in London’s high court by an incredulous Sir Andrew Nicol, it was clear that neither side was willing to hold anything back, including the kitchen sink, if it helped their case, or at any rate heaped damage on the other side.

If either of them is to be believed, or, just as likely, both of them, they were like a heavy-metal version of Punch & Judy or an “adult” Itchy & Scratchy from The Simpsons. On one occasion, Depp is said to have hurled whisky bottles, “like grenades” at his wife. During a row in 2015, he allegedly dragged her by her hair around their apartment, pulling clumps of her hair out and repeatedly punching her in the head. Not surprisingly, Depp denies the claim. In the same opened vein, Heard rejects the suggestion that she severed one of Depp’s fingers by throwing a vodka bottle at him which smashed against his hand. She also denies that she once deliberately defaecated on the marital bed – an image only marginally less disturbing than waking up, like the Jack Woltz character in The Godfather, to find a horse’s head on the pillow next to you.

Dubbed by Depp a crime scene waiting to happen, the marriage seems to have hit rock-bottom in a very short space of time. But then, they are movie stars, used to playing out high drama in front of the cameras. If you are larger than life on the big screen, why not in your private life, where you get to write your own script and are your own film editor, if not the director?

The lives of these two pampered stars, as presented in court, life read like an amalgam of L.A. Confidential, Fatal Attraction and a particularly anarchic episode of Tom and Jerry. According to their evidence, they have survived more batterings than a batch of cod in a Glasgow fish ’n chip saloon.  The risk is that they are giving Hell-raising a bad name. Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke will be shaking their heads in disgust. Marlon Brando and Richard Harris will be turning in their graves. Why would anyone want to live like this? Was it all made up, or was it real? A bit of both perhaps. But we should know soon enough. The case, as they say, continues.  It is due to finish next week.