He's hip, he's hot and he's drop dead gorgeous. The only way enigmatic actor Johnny Depp will escape the hype is by buying his own island. Unfortunately Mustique's already taken, reports SOPHIE COOPER

With his latest film, Fear and Loathing, causing controversy and consternation among the public and critics alike, and with the birth of his child with singer and actress Vanessa Paradis, Hollywood's favorite rebel Johnny Depp is well and truly in the limelight-and as usual he's finding it a mixed blessing.

One of the few places where Depp does manage to drop out of sight is on the swanky Caribbean island of Mustique, playground of the very rich, very famous-and very-camera-shy. Depp, 35, visited the island several times with his on-off girlfriend of four years, supermodel Kate Moss, splashing out £ 4000 a week to hole up in Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall's villa Stargroves. When the paparazzi pounced on the couple as they took a break with Oasis singer Noel Gallager and his wife Meg Matthews, Depp's response was a two-fingered one.

"If there's anything I really want, it's privacy," he says wistfully, back home in the Hollywood hills. "Maybe I should do what Brando did 30 years ago - buy an island. Maybe take my girl and some friends and just go there and sleep. And read, and swim and think clear thoughts. Because you really can't do that here. Yo can't be normal…you can't just hang out and have a cup of coffee and pick your nose."

"Normal" is not something you'd expect Johnny Depp to aspire to. He's famous for playing freaks, weirdos, misfits - characters on the fringes of society such as the surreal Edward Scissorhands, good-hearted Gilbert Grape, transvestite film-maker Ed Wood and a Mafia informer in Donnie Brasco. He's consistently ignored the shiny stuff in favor of the slightly askew, rejecting the big-budget billing other actors are gagging for. Roles that Depp refused include Brad Pitt's in Legends of the Fall, Keanu's in Speed - and the part of Lestat in Interview With The Vampire, eventually played by Tom Cruise. "I'm not a Blockbuster boy, I never wanted to be," he says. "I just don't want to look back in 30 or 40 or 50 years and have my grandkids say, "You did a lot of stupid s***, Granddad. What an idiot you were, smiling for the cameras and playing the game."

Depp almost lost his first big-screen success to Cruise, who was first choice for the lead in the 1991 film Edward Scissorhands, a dark adult fairytale just mainstream enough to be a box-office hit.

"I'm attracted to the people who are considered freaks," he has repeatedly told journalists. "Since I was young, I've identified with characters considered by "normal" society to be outcasts and oddballs."

Johnny Depp was born the youngest of four children in Owensboro, Kentucky, and he actually had a pretty conventional all-American upbringing - complete with parents' divorce when he was 16. But the Depp family moved house more than 20 times when Johnny was still small - leaving him with a nagging sense of rootlessness and a preoccupation with continuity. He writes a journal, filled with what he calls "brain vomit", and collects a variety of bizarre items ranging from bugs to an overcoat once worn by one of his heroes, American Beat writer Jack Kerouac.

"I like the idea that I can make a drawing or I can make a painting or I can write notes, write my sort of journal thing, and someday my kid will have that."

He's also considering bequeathing hit tattoos - if someone would "maybe invent a frame with some kind of fluid that keeps them." These include a tribute to his mother, Betty Sue, and the infamous "Wino Forever" in honor of old flame Winona Ryder.

Johnny never set out to be in movies at all - he wanted to be a musician. After the family moved to Mirimar, Florida, he dropped out of school to play in a teen cover band called The Kids, which was good enough to support acts such as Iggy Pop, Chuck Berry and The Pretenders. According to Depp's first manager, Robert Mascaro, "Johnny, who was about 14, could draw teenage girls no matter what. He walked the walk and talked the talk event at that age."

In 1983, the band moved to Los Angeles in a bid to hit the big time, but instead they fell apart - as did Depp's short-lived marriage to make-up artist Lori Anne Allison. "One day he was married, then a bit later he wasn't, and he never really talked about it again," says Mascaro.

At this point Depp's chiseled, part-Cherokee looks came to the rescue. His buddy, actor Nicolas Cage, introduced him to director Wes Craven, who was casting for the teen horror pic Nightmare on Elm Street. Depp ended up the victim of Freddy Krueger.

After a best-forgotten appearance baring his butt in the 1985 film Private Resort, Johnny got his first big break in the TV series 21 Jump Street, playing squeaky-clean undercover cop Tom Hanson. He quickly became the idol of the nation's teenage girls - and he hated every minute of it. "TV Boy, Heart-throb, Teen Idol, Teen Hunk," he wrote later. "Plastered, postured, patented, painted, plastic!!!"

People - and especially women - haven't stopped looking ever since. Nowadays, Johnny's earning 4 million a film and his mountainous fan mail contains a variety of threats, promises - and pubic hair. He doesn't mind the nude photographs - "Some are beautiful - nicely lit, black-and-white, mysterious. Some are out-and-out primitive," but the body hair is another matter - "I don't save them."

When Depp left 21 Jump Street, he couldn't wait to shed the teen hunk image. His chance came when John Waters offered him the lead in the offbeat 1990 movie, Cry-Baby. Edward Scissorhands followed, then in 1992 the role of screwball Sam in Benny & Joon.

Then there was another outsider, the gentle dreamer trapped by family responsibilities in What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993). This was a bit too close to home for Depp, who had supported his mother through the messy aftermath of her divorce. The film also coincided with the drug-related death of River Phoenix out-side Depp's LA club, The Viper Room, and marked a general low point in Depp's personal life, if not in his career. For this reason, he's never actually watched Gilbert Grape. "It was such a sad time for me - I can't," he says. "I don't know what was going on. Well, I was poisoning myself beyond belief. There was a lot of liquor."

His next venture, Arizona Dream, was no particularly noteworthy - except for two things - it sparked Depp's obsession with Jack Kerouac, and co-star Faye Dunaway said he was a super kisser. But in 1994, Scissorhands director and mentor Tim Burton offered Depp another offbeat part - playing transvestite film maker Ed Wood. This black-and-white biopic revealed the true extent of Depp's talent.

Around the same time, two events took place outside work that made him stop and think. One was being rushed to hospital - "I was living on coffee and cigarettes, no food, no sleep. I was sitting around with some pals when my heart started running at 200 beats a minute," he told an interviewer from Playboy. "I got a shot - boom, a shot that basically stops your heart for a second…now there's an experience that'll scare you into shape."

The second was an "incident" in a $500-a-night room at Manhattan's swanky Mark Hotel (in which Depp has claimed the damage was done by a runaway dachshund) - which resulted in Depp being charged with criminal mischief.

With him on that fateful night was his long-term, on-off girlfriend Kate Moss - now out of the picture as Depp strengthens his relationship with Vanessa Paradis.

Depp claims to be strictly a one-woman man while in a relationship. "Fidelity is important as long as it's pure. But the moment it goes against your insides - if you want to be somewhere else, if she wants to dabble - then you need to make a change."

Before he met Moss, his love life was immortalised by the popular bumper sticker "Honk if you haven't been engaged to Johnny Depp." The list of those who had been included Ryder - his co-star in Edward Scissorhands, Jennifer Grey (of Dirty Dancing fame) and Sherilyn Fenn (Twin Peaks). "I'm not sure any human being is made to be with one person forever and ever, amen…" he admits. "I've been with some great girls and I certainly thought I loved them, though now I have my doubts. I felt something intense, but was it love? I don't know. So now I can't say I can love someone forever, or if anybody can."

In 1995, Johnny played the greatest lover of them all, Don Juan De Marco. Although the film received a mixed reception, a couple of dreams came true for Johnny. First, he worked alongside on of his gurus, Marlon Brando - he's been very, very supportive" - and second, he got to be in a scene with 250 naked women, although he says he couldn't fully appreciate the experience - "I have one bad eye, so there go 125 right there."

Depp's next choice - Nick of Time, directed by John Badham - appeared to be his closest yet to a mainstream action movie. But it didn't overly impress the public, and the film went straight to video.

The off-beat Western Dead Man, made in 1996, didn't do much better. Depp waived his fee in exchange for the privilege of working with the director, Jim Jarmusch, another of his personal icons.

But Depp was to shine in Donnie Brasco - holding his own opposite his veteran co-star, Al Pacino.

Always attracted by this kind of social and moral limbo, Depp then launched into new and risky territory with his directorial debut, The Brave. But the film was ripped apart at Cannes, and has so far failed to get a distributor in America or Britain. "You just feel like you've ripped your chest cavity open and just begged someone to s*** in it," was Depp's graphic reaction to the experience.

Undeterred, he put his head on the block again, shaving it first to star as the notorious Hunter S. Thompson in the drug-fuelled legend, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.

To play Depp's alter ego, Raoul Duke, Depp spent a lot of time with the man himself, now living in Woody Creek, Colorado. The pair hit it off, and went on to spend six months together during filming.

Back home, Johnny lives in a $3 million Hollywood mansion - formerly owned by Bela Lugosi. He's currently in Europe, filming The Ninth Gate, based on Arturo Perez-Reverte's 1997 novel, The Club Dumas. Depp plays an antique books expert who gets sucked into a supernatural conspiracy. There's always talk of Depp moving permanently to Europe - perhaps Paris, which he once visited so that he could sleep in the bed where Oscar Wilde died.

He's also got more personal projects in mind. His girlfriend singer Vanessa Paradis recently gave birth to their child, although the pregnancy was a carefully guarded secret. Fatherhood should suit Depp, who claims to be a family man at heart.

"I'm an old-fashioned guy…I want to be an old man with a beer belly sitting on a porch looking at a lake or something," he insists. Or even better, the Caribbean Sea - time to start island-hunting perhaps?

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