Robert Downey Jr.

Robert Downey Jr. was born in New York in 1965 to underground filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., and grew up on movie sets, making his screen debut as a small child in his father's work. He was also, tragically, exposed to drugs within his own family from a very young age — a fact he would later cite as the root of a lifelong struggle.

By the 1980s he was a rising star, part of the Brat Pack generation, and clearly one of the most naturally gifted actors of his cohort. In Chaplin (1992) he gave a tour-de-force performance as Charlie Chaplin that earned him an Academy Award nomination and marked him as a major talent. But the addiction was already tightening its grip.

From the mid-1990s Downey's life collapsed into a very public spiral of drug abuse and arrests. He was picked up for possession of heroin and cocaine, famously found in one incident wandering into a neighbour's home and passing out in a child's bed. Rehab stints failed; he repeatedly relapsed.

Between 1996 and 2001 he was arrested multiple times, jailed, and spent time in a state prison. He was fired from the television show Ally McBeal after further drug arrests. By the early 2000s he was, in the industry's cold verdict, uninsurable — no studio would risk a production on a man everyone assumed was going to die. One of the finest actors of his generation had become a cautionary tale.

After his last arrest in 2001, something changed. Downey got sober and stayed sober, crediting a combination of rehabilitation, family, therapy, martial arts and the steadfast support of the producer Susan Levin, whom he married in 2005.

Getting work was another matter. Studios still saw a liability. Films like The Singing Detective and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) began to rebuild trust, often with directors and co-stars personally vouching for him and, in some cases, portions of his salary held in escrow against a relapse. Slowly, the industry started to believe he had really come back.

In 2008, director Jon Favreau fought to cast the still-risky Downey as Tony Stark in Iron Man. It was the gamble of the decade. Downey didn't just play the wisecracking billionaire — he became him, anchoring what grew into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the highest-grossing film franchise ever, and turning himself into the highest-paid actor in the world.

For over a decade he was the face of a global phenomenon, culminating in Tony Stark's sacrifice in Avengers: Endgame (2019). Then he proved the reinvention ran deeper than a superhero suit: in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer (2023) he delivered a career-best supporting turn that finally won him the Academy Award, decades after Chaplin. From a prison cell and an unemployable name to an Oscar and the top of Hollywood — Robert Downey Jr.'s is the redemption story every other one is measured against.