Johnny Depp's midlife meltdown

Flirting with co-stars, hard nights with wild rockers and ever-longer trips away from home finally took their toll.

The 14-year love affair between Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis was the perfect antidote to Hollywood’s tales of infidelity, deceit and divorce. With two beautiful children and a life together in the sleepy French town of Plan-de-la-Tour, Johnny and Vanessa had found peace a world away from the relationship graveyard that is LA.

So when Johnny began pushing for a move back to Hollywood this time last year, it’s no wonder their inner circle was baffled. Why was the former hell-raiser yearning to return to the scene of his wild nights and volatile relationships? Friends began to wonder if Johnny and Vanessa’s life of serenity could survive a return to the chaos of Hollywood.

In April this year, when Johnny bizarrely joined controversial goth icon Marilyn Manson to play a gig in LA before a wild night out with his entourage of leather-clad girls, the Hollywood grapevine was abuzz with reports that Johnny had been “openly flirting” and “not acting like a married man”. Adding fuel to the fire, Johnny appeared to spend more and more time alone in LA, leaving Vanessa in France.

Already leading separate lives, Vanessa was then forced to endure speculation that Johnny had been tempted into an affair with his 26-year-old openly bisexual The Rum Diary co-star Amber Heard. One source who worked on the film tells Woman’s Day that Amber spent much of the time on set “teasing Johnny and talking to him about her relationship with her girlfriend, their sex life and how open-minded she was in the bedroom”.