Robert Downey Jr. is an American actor known for roles in a wide variety of films, including Iron Man, Chaplin, Soapdishand Wonder Boys.
Born in New York City on April 4, 1965, Robert Downey Jr. began acting as a young child. He made his first film appearances and was a cast member on Saturday Night Live in the 1980s, but his growing success was marred by years of struggles with drug abuse. Eventually turning his life around, he earned a resurgance of critical and popular acclaim, and is considered one of Hollywood's A-list actors.
Famed actor Robert Downey Jr. was born on April 4, 1965, in New York City, the son of the avant-garde filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., who is best known for the 1969 film Putney Swope. Downey began acting as a young child. His mother, Elsie, was an actress who instilled in her son a love of performing. Raised in Greenwich Village with his older sister, Alison, Downey made his film debut playing a puppy in his father's film, Pound (1970), in which actors played dogs. He would go on to have small parts in several more of his father's films.
Downey's parents divorced when he was 13, and the young actor ended up living in Los Angeles, California, with his father. At the age of 16, however, he dropped out of high school and was on the move again, relocating to New York to live with his mother.
Downey made his earliest feature film appearances in such films asBaby, It's You (1983), Firstborn (1984), Weird Science (1985) andBack to School (1986). From 1985 to '86, he was a regular cast member of Saturday Night Live, NBC's popular sketch-comedy program.
Downey's first leading role on the big screen was a charming womanizer in The Pick-up Artist (1987), a romantic comedy co-starring Molly Ringwald that was written and directed by James Toback. His breakthrough performance came in 1987 with Less Than Zero (1987), in which he co-starred with Andrew McCarthy. Downey played the party loving, cocaine-addicted Julian Wells in the film.
Sadly, the story line and character rang especially true for Downey, who had been introduced to drugs at the age of eight by his father, and developed a full-fledged addiction as he headed into his 20s.
"Until that movie, I took my drugs after work and on the weekends," he later explained. "Maybe I'd turn up hungover on the set, but no more so than the stuntman. That changed on Less Than Zero. I was playing this junkie-faggot guy, and, for me, the role was like the ghost of Christmas future. The character was an exaggeration of myself. Then things changed, and, in some ways, I became an exaggeration of the character. That lasted far longer than it needed to last."
A stint in drug rehabilitation followed shortly afterward, but Downey's struggles with drugs and alcohol would continue. And yet, his career continued to advance forward. By the early 1990s, Downey had established a reputation as a critically acclaimed A-List actor. He earned praise for his comic turn as a shifty soap opera producer in Soapdish (1991), co-starring Sally Field, Kevin Kline andWhoopi Goldberg.
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