The "bad boy" has found his angel
Translation of an article from the French TV guide "Tele 7 Jours", issue n=B02073, February 19-25/2000, by Karelle.
It was one year ago. On the stage of the Champs Elysees theater, Johnny Depp was given a honory Cesar award. And revealed publicly his love. On February the 19, nominated for The Girl on the bridge, Vanessa might be rewarded in her turn before the live broadcast on Canal +, at 8:30pm. Here's the story of a movie idol, whom the most beautiful song is named Lily-Rose Melody, their eight month old daughter.
An evening in June 1998, in a red lounge with the misty lights of the Costes hotel in Paris, Johnny Depp is waiting for some friends. A few minutes ago, on the The Ninth Gate set, he still was Dean Corso, hero given to devil, directed by Roman Polanski. The actor has just left the devil incarnate, his partner Emmanuelle Seigner, he doesn't still know that tonight he has a
rendezvous with an angel: Vanessa Paradis, invited to the same place by friends, that he doesn't know.
For sometimes, Vanessa is preparing for the shooting of The Girl on the Bridge, a movie by Patrice Leconte with Daniel Auteuil. At the beginning of the story, her character Adele, a broken woman, says these words: "I'm waiting for something to happen to me." Vanessa doesn't know either.
During the dinner, several times over, her clear eyes meet Johnny's. "I love men who have shiny eyes", she said about Alain Delon and Belmondo, her dads in "Chance Against" directed by the Sam
E Leconte. For her, Johnny has the eyes which shine. He askes a friend to invite to their table the so nice elf whose gaiety and smile already disarm him. After being introduced, the talk opens, light, exciting. Vanessa speaks perfectly english and so, talks only to Johnny.
She likes the "bad boys". These men, a little dreamier, a little more uncompromising than other ones. These kamikazes full of emotion, like Florent Pagny (a famous french singer) or Lenny Kravitz she loved very much. "I was for long my worse ennemy", confides Johnny evoking his nocturnal leeways. At 35, the disquieting actor of Cherokee extraction, knew its fire, knocks of madness (devasting for example, a hotel room in New York in 1994), wild breaks up: Winona Ryder, Kate Moss, twig women who inflamed him.
In the red lounge of the Costes hotel, the 26 year-old angel who looks at him, doesn't fear of burning her wings, and for the dark Johnny, this night will be as luminous as a morning. Immediately on the next day, has been said, at midnight, Vanessa discreetly rejoins him in his room, leaves him at dawn. Quickly, the lovers want to share other sceneries: Deauville, London, Roma. Then, the same universe: at the end of June, Johnny rents an apartment in Montmartre. Three months later, vanessa is expecting a baby. Johnny hopes it will be a girl.
About their romance, they don't talk, protect it like a precious thing. Until March the 6 of 1999. On the stage of the Champs-Elysees theater, actor Pascal Greggory, who portrais the duke of Aleneon in Luc Besson's Joan of Arc, The messenger, is in charge of giving to Johnny an honory Cesar award. "We're proud that you accept this honour tonight, he says to his friend. Maybe it's because you're making, thanks to one of our most beautiful actresses, a new little french girl or a new little french boy."
Vanessa is six and a half months pregnant. "My girl" as Johnny calls her, gets ready to promote The Girl on the Bridge, which the coming out on March the 31. She has no idea that the next year, on February the 19 of 2000, she will be nominated for best actress for her staggering
interpretation of Adele, and maybe invited to go up on the same stage.
On May the 27, in the Neuilly American hospital, Vanessa gives birth to Lily-Rose Melody. At 8:35pm, Johnny cuts himself the umbilical cord. "I didn't want a stranger to cut this link between our daughter and us".
They calmly prepared for the birth, in Vanessa parents' property, the Moulin, in Seine-et-Marne (near Paris). Johnny informed his family in the United States: a dozen of people, in which his mother and his step-father, made the trip for Lily-Rose. Johnny proves perfect: he bottle-feeds, changes the nappies, "I'm pretty gifted", he specifies. The next day, Mother's Day, he has deliver to the hospital a gigantic bunch of white lilys and roses, the flowers which inspired the name of the baby. "The birth of my daughter gave me quite a turn which is way beyond what cinema offers", he says. "Since, I know why it's good to be alive. And why, for years, a magnetic power attracted me to Paris. It was my family I was looking for. It wa s Vanessa and Lily-Rose. I want to bring up my daughter in Paris. America frightens me, because of murders, shootings in high schools. I want a healthier and safer atmosphere."
On bad boys too, love performs miracles.
Until the age of going to school, Lily-Rose travels with her parents: from the eighteen century private hotel in Saint-Germain-ades-pres (a district in Paris) to the fifteen-room mansion on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, to the property bought by Johnny near Saint-Tropez. "In future, I'm going to be careful about my choices. I have a family to keep. In the past, money represented freedom. Today, security. I built a career of losers, he continues. The fact that I can find a job always surprises me. My movies were never a success at the box-office." Except now, after sixteen years in the business, Sleepy Hollow. This movie, which has just been released in France, is his third collaboration with Tim Burton (Edward scissorhands, and Ed Wood). Johnny plays a beginning eighteen century pragmatic and timid policeman in charge of an investigation about mysterious beheadings. "I wanted to perform my character, Ichabod Crane, as if he was a very frail little nine-year old girl, fragile and sensitive. An interesting approach of an action hero, isn't it."
Soon, he will be shooting a second movie directed by Terry Gilliam after Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The Man who Killed Don Quixotte, with Jean Rochefort. In the spring, Vanessa will release her new record, signed by M, Mathieu Chedid (a french singer and composer).
Their harmony is also music: Johnny, close friend of the rocker Iggy Pop, taught Vanessa to play guitar. He's an actor-musician, she's a singer-actress. And their most beautiful composition is named "Lily-Rose Melody."
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