The decline of Johnny Depp should be a cautionary tale

Just to be perfectly clear: I don't feel sorry for Johnny Depp. How can you? But I do think it's sad that he appears to have self sabotaged his career to some degree in a toxic mixture of hubris and bad life decisions. There have been a spate of recent articles detailing everything from his road to financial ruin to his alleged prodigious drug and alcohol abuse.

And even more disturbing are allegations of abuse by him, against his ex-wife, actress Amber Heard and most recently against a location manager on an upcoming film.

Things are totally dire for the now 55-year-old actor (I was actually surprised by how old he is, and perhaps this streak of bad behavior is a prolonged mid-life crisis), he still cranks out profitable (albeit critically reviled) Pirates of the Caribbean movies, which presumably fill his coffers quite nicely.

And he's even going to appear in the family-friendly surefire blockbuster Fantastic Beasts movie due out later this year, so he hasn't become totally toxic as far as Hollywood is concerned ... yet.

But something tells me he could be well on his way down a road another infamous character actor-turned-bloated-egomaniac-movie star has gone down. I'm thinking Nicolas Cage.

While Cage still can occasionally do work that earns great critical notice, he has largely become a parody of himself, churning out forgettable direct to DVD films which only serve to erase the fond memories he created with classics like Raising Arizona and Moonstruck.

He too hamstrung his career by enduring a high-profile financial collapse as well as well-documented bouts of bratty behavior. With Depp, the shift in his image feels even more abrupt, especially considering his unlikely rise up Hollywood's A-list.

I'm old enough to remember when Depp was largely box office poison. While he occasionally carried the offbeat sleeper now and then like Edward Scissorhands, he was an actor's actor, willing to take on risky projects and subvert his boyish, sex idol persona.

But once he got his hands on the Pirates franchise he basically never looked back. There were some occasional glimmers of the interesting, unpredictable actor he once was, such as the underrated Black Mass, but he has largely seemed on autopilot for the last 15 years, willing to play quirky in airquotes while cashing in on forgettable fluff like the Alice in Wonderland movies or Tim Burton's reboot of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

I saw in a recent interview that he'd rationalized this decision to abandon his character actor reputation as not selling out, but instead invading the power structure at behemoths like Disney. And while I can concede that his first Oscar nominated performance as Captain Jack Sparrow did feel subversive and risky, it ceased being that after four sequels.

Of course, some characters should be and deserve to be movies stars, and I would never knock someone who decides to take a paycheck project now and then. But I do wonder if Depp made a bit of a deal with the devil when it comes to his career, and whether his willingness to sacrifice craft for commerce has now started to backfire.