The series also gave him a visibility that eased his eventual transition into feature films.From the start, he was attracted to quirky artistic projects rather than the Hollywood mainstream. Depp has told interviewers he imagined, even then, that he would one day want to tell his children they could be proud of the choices he made. And so he eschewed the part eventually awarded to Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise and opted instead for John Waters’ Cry Baby and then, in his break-out part, Tim Burton’s on-screen alter-ego in Edward Scissorhands.His performances since then have been frequently memorable, and never less than intriguing. As a new arrival to Los Angeles in the early 1980s, he ran into Nicolas Cage, who in turn introduced him to his agent.

He auditioned for a part in the horror film Nightmare on Elm Street, and to his astonishment got it.In 1987, he got his first big break in the television series 21 Jump Street, in which he played an undercover cop. (He was once employed as a ballpoint-pen salesman.)His entr?to acting came about by accident. To capture Willy Wonka’s voice, he practised on his daughter Lily, now six, the aim being to intrigue her without scaring her.Such instinctual decision-making has informed much of Depp’s life. He was born in Kentucky to itinerant parents who spent most of his formative years in Florida. He was, by turns, a high school drop-out, a budding rock musician who once opened for Iggy Pop, and scrimping odd-job man. That was the pitfall of the 1971 Chocolate Factory, which was never as popular in Europe as it was in the United States. Conversely, the new version may well go down much better on this side of the Atlantic.Part of what makes Depp such a consistently surprising actor is the fact he is also a highly instinctual one.

He has described how he knows within a few pages of a shooting script whether it is for him or not; how, even on the first reading, he scribbles down ideas and images which almost always form the core of how he ends up playing the part.Reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, he thought of nothing so much as the goofy hosts of television shows from his youth – characters such as Captain Kangaroo and Mr Rogers – who made him wonder, even at a tender age, if they could possibly be so strange in the confines of their own homes. The whole film, including Depp’s contribution, is much closer to the spirit of the book than the 1971 version, revelling in Dahl’s gleeful portrayal of children as squirming balls of perversity who stand a chance of being civilised only if handled appropriately by sensitive and far-sighted adults.Mainstream American culture, by contrast, tends to view children quite differently – as angelic expressions of human innocence buffeted by an uncomprehending world – which can lead to a certain cloying sentimentality in film entertainment aimed at younger audiences. Wilder himself has added fuel to the fire by dismissing the entire movie (before he had seen it) as an artistically needless remake.Part of the American response to Depp’s performance, one suspects, is tied with a tendency to mistrust Roald Dahl’s peculiar authorial sensibility. Many critics have fond memories of Gene Wilder’s drastically different interpretation in the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and resent Depp’s effort to take the character in a different direction.