JOHNNY DEPP TO PLAY MICHAEL JACKSON

Hollywood's most enigmatic star Johnny Depp is daring to brave the mainstream once again. Mail Film Editor GRAHAM YOUNG welcomes him back.

NOTE: This feature was first published in the Birmingham Mail on January 7, 2000.... it was long before Pirates of the Caribbean etc but, clearly, here was a man sensibly going out of his way to avoid the pitfalls of being another Michael Jackson, so better now to play him?

FAME doesn't sit easily on Johnny Depp's slender shoulders which are now touched by an impressively thick mane of hair for a man of 36.

It struck him most powerfully after a teen cop TV series called 21 Jump Street turned him into a product.

For years he veered heavily away from anything which might have made him the world's biggest star on top of the recognition from his peers that he's also the best thirtysomething around.

From his debut in A Nightmare In Elm Street back in 1984, which became a much bigger hit than anyone expected, he hasn't exactly been seen in a string of blockbusters.

Private Resort, Platoon, Cry-Baby, Arizona Dream, Benny & Jon, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Ed Wood, Don Juan DeMarco, Nick Of Time, Dead Man, Donnie Brasco, The Brave, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas and his most latest bomb The Astronaut's Wife have all honed his talents rather than earned millions for studios.

A decade ago, Edward Scissorhands marked his talent out for real. In a strikingly original fable, he played a man-made boy whose creator (Vincent Price) died before he finished his hands.

Now Johnny is back in the big time, reunited with Scissorhands' director Tim Burton for the third time after Ed Wood also won universal critical acclaim but surprisingly flopped beyond all expectations.

And, as the squeamishly eccentric constable Ichabod Crane in the first big film of the year 2000, SLEEPY HOLLOW (15), he's working with another veteran horror star - Christopher Lee.

Last year, Lee said Depp was the leading actor of his generation, if not the best of all time. How does Johnny react to such praise?

'Nervous,' he says after pausing for thought. 'That's one enormous compliment. I don't know how to react to that, except that if an actor really starts to buy into all of that stuff and is totally and completely satisfied with his work, then it's all over for him because you have nothing to reach for, nothing to push against.

'You then become complacent and only do something because Formula 'A' works.'

Johnny says challenging all of that is very stimulating - and in that respect he doesn't even regard himself as a movie star.

'That's reserved for other people. I just see myself as an actor, if that. A guy with a strange job.

'When 21 Jump Street took off I was so terrified of becoming a major product for a corporation.

'It was horrifying. I had not control over anything. They sold me down the river as this thing and it just wasn't me.

'You go from struggling to everything happening at 200mph and there is nothing to grab on to. There's no foundation, no reality and I swore that they would never play that game with me ever again.

'I've been really lucky - because I still get work!'

Sleepy Hollow will certainly ensure he stays off the dole queue. It's been a big hit in America and this effective Hammer Horror tribute deserves to be a British smash, too.

Why make something so obviously commercial after all that's gone before?

'I just wanted to work with Tim again,' he says. 'So just hopped up. I thought we could do a new version of a classic leading man - and then twist it round.

'I saw Ichabod as a facade of stoicism but also a crumbling, pre-pubescent very fragile little girl.'

The film features lots of decapitations and creepy crawlies, but humour is always apparent in every scene.

Though Johnny himself admits to a fear of spiders, his biggest challenge was actually kissing his old mate Christina Ricci who plays the bewitching Katrina Van Tassell.

'She's still only 19 - and I've known her since she was nine, so that was... weird.' he says.

Depp speaks very quietly. He even asks permission if he can smoke - 'I'm glad I'm not in America right now' - and is hypnotically handsome.

Currently sporting a goatee beard and pencil slim moustache, he looks as if he could ride off with the Three Musketeers at any time.

There's a cumbersome-looking silver ring on the third finger of each hand and a couple of small tattoos in odd places, too.

Johnny once said: 'Feet are fascinating, don't you think? They tell you so much about people'.

Today, he's wearing suede shoes that are at once very heavily scuffed yet still stylish.

His jeans and grey denim shirt might look new, but his shoes tell me he likes to be grounded in old favourites. A wild man of Hollywood? No, surely here's a sensitive soul who just likes to have faith in things he can trust.

Born in Owensboro, Kentucky - a place relatively unfamiliar in Britain which makes it that much harder to pin him down - Johnny played in a rock group called The Kids before turning to acting.

After a divorce and engagements to actresses Sherilyn Fenn, Jennifer Grey and Winona Ryder, plus another failed liaison with model Kate Moss, he is currently making his home in Paris with singer Vanessa and their seven-month old daughter Lily Rose.

His new-found domesticity seems to have gone him good.

When he was a mere uncle to the children of his sisters and brother he used to fear the apparent fragility of babies.

Now he talks lovingly of changing nappies and of how he now hates being away from his bairn.

There's even bombshell for his fans. 'I don't want to work! And I wouldn't want to be away from her for any substantial length of time at this stage in her life. I would have a breakdown, just go ape.'

Having grown up watching Monty Python, Johnny has a well developed British sense of humour.

One of his favourite tricks is to use a tiny 'wind' machine to surprise people.

'When I was with Marlon Brando (Don Juan DeMarco) I told him I'd had some bad food on an aeroplane,' he recalls.

'I kept letting this machine off in my fingers every ten seconds and it kept Brando going for half an hour.

'He was on the verge of calling an ambulance for me.

'Even if I was only an extra or got one line, I would love to star in The Fast Show and have had dinner with Paul Whitehouse. I think he is one of your finest actors.

'A lot of my American friends don't get the humour, but I love it. It's so quick.'

Johnny loves England, too, and might one day even live here having enjoyed his long months working on Sleepy Hollow at Leavesden and Shepperton Studios.

'British technicians are really funny and clever and quick," he says.

'There's is a smart humour. I was really shocked by that.

'I also went on a drive down to Rye in Sussex - it's really beautiful countryside down there.

'I'm not sure I can stay in any one place for too long, though, certainly not a big city without going a little nuts and feeling a bit claustrophobic.'

TIM BURTON'S Sleepy Hollow has been adapted from the classic short story The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving.

New York born, he was the first American to earn a living from writing, but his most famous creation - Rip Van Winkle - was actually written in Birmingham while the rest of his household slept.

Irving was the youngest of 11 children born to a couple who emigrated from England to America in the great exodus of the late 18th Century.

At the age of 21, in 1804, he decided to visit his sister and brother-in-law - boyhood friend Henry Van Wart - in Birmingham and soon emabarked on his first visits round Warwick, Kenilworth and Stratford.

Ten years later he came back and efffectively launched the ongoing American tourist invasion of Stratford by compiling The Stratford Sketch from his regular base at the Red Horse Hotel on Bridge Street - sadly replaced by a Marks & Spencer store 20 years ago.

Irving wrote Rip Van Winkle and Bracebridge Hall (considered to refer to Aston Hall) while he was recovering from illness and staying with the Van Warts at 13 Calthrope Street (now Road) in Edgbaston, during one of his many visits.