If it is true that every generation has its own beautiful and damned, for the teenagers of the nineties it certainly was River Phoenixthe James Dean of Generation melancholy look, hair blowing in the wind, blond restless with a more than promising career, who passed away prematurely. The news, the October 31, 1993, it was a bolt from the blue, the same day as Federico Fellini’s death: the promise and the myth, the irony of coincidences in a combination of numbers.
A sudden death that of Phoenix, exactly thirty years ago, in circumstances that over time have often been the subject of speculation and mysteries. Who knows what he would have become, River, born in 1970, older brother of Joaquin, Summer, Rain and Liberty. Unusual names for babies, but then the parents were hippies at the time. River owed her to the watercourse “of life” of Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, and in 2019 his brother Joaquin honored him by naming his firstborn after him Rooney Mara.
He would certainly have made it in Hollywood River, the conditions were all there. At a very young age he immediately made himself noticed, first in the role of Chris Chambers, the tormented teenager of Stand By Me – Memory of a Summer, based on Stephen King’s bestseller, and then in Living on the run, by Sidney Lumet, which in 1989 earned him his first Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
The actual consecration, however, came in 1991, with Beautiful and damned, thanks to the role of Mike Waters, a drug addict who prostitutes himself for a living, for which he won the Volpi Cup in Venice. Alongside him, in the role of Scott Favor, the friend Keanu Reeves. If he hadn’t died we would have seen him in Interview with the Vampirehe had in fact won the role of the interviewer which then went to Christian Slater (who donated all the proceeds to the charities supported by Phoenix, Earth Trust and Earth Save, he was a convinced environmentalist) and in the role of Jack Dawson in Titanic (James Cameron had thought of it for him, he never made a secret of it).
The spell was broken at Viper Room, premises owned by Johnny Depp in Los Angeles opened in August of that same year. River, 23, felt sick after taking a cocktail fatal from cocaine, marijuana and other drugs. That evening he was supposed to play (he was, in fact, also a musician) but when he arrived at the club together with his girlfriend Samantha Mathis, his sister Rain and his brother Joaquin, they immediately realized that something was wrong. He was nervous, upset, not very lucid. He collapsed in the street, in front of the entrance, and never recovered, also due to a delay in rescue. In those days everything was said, from the hypothesis of murder (GHB, now also known as the rape drug, was circulating in the clubs and someone hypothesized that they had put it in a glass, because according to his girlfriend River had not taken drugs that evening ) until the alleged involvement of Johnny Depp. “Try to imagine what it means to live with this sense of guilt”the actor would later say during an interview with Rolling Stones; River, after all, was one of his closest friends. Depp was not at fault. Phoenix had ghosts of him, and like many before and after him, he was a victim of them.
Depp, the Phoenix brothers, Keanu Reeves, and then Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, who was also at the Viper that damned evening, were all children of a generation of promises. Not all have been maintained.
Source: Vanity Fair
I’m Susan Karen, a professional writer and editor at World Stock Market. I specialize in Entertainment news, writing stories that keep readers informed on all the latest developments in the industry. With over five years of experience in creating engaging content and copywriting for various media outlets, I have grown to become an invaluable asset to any team.
