Robert Downey Jr. facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Robert Downey Jr.
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Downey in 2014
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Robert John Downey Jr.
April 4, 1965 New York City, U.S.
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| Years active | 1970–present |
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Works
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Filmography |
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| Partner(s) | Sarah Jessica Parker (1984–1991) |
| Children | 3 |
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| Awards | Full list |
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Robert John Downey Jr. (born April 4, 1965) is an American actor. His films as a leading actor have grossed over $14 billion worldwide, making him one of the highest-grossing actors of all time. Downey's career has been characterized by some early success, a period of run-ins with the law, and a surge in popular and commercial success in the 2000s. In 2008, Downey was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. From 2013 to 2015, he was listed by Forbes as Hollywood's highest-paid actor.
At the age of five, Downey made his acting debut in his father Robert Downey Sr.'s film Pound in 1970. He subsequently worked with the Brat Pack in the teen films Weird Science (1985) and Less than Zero (1987). In 1992, Downey portrayed Charlie Chaplin in the biopic Chaplin, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor and won a BAFTA Award. He joined the TV series Ally McBeal, for which he won a Golden Globe Award. He was fired from the show in 2000 and 2001.
Downey starred in the 2003 film The Singing Detective; Mel Gibson paid Downey's insurance bond because completion bond companies would not insure him. Downey went on to star in the black comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), the thriller Zodiac (2007), and the action comedy Tropic Thunder (2008); for the latter, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Downey gained global recognition for starring as Iron Man in ten films within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, beginning with Iron Man (2008), and leading up to Avengers: Endgame (2019). He has also played Sherlock Holmes in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes (2009), which earned him his second Golden Globe, and its sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011). Downey has also taken on dramatic parts in The Judge (2014) and Oppenheimer (2023), winning an Academy Award, Golden Globe and a BAFTA Award for his portrayal of Lewis Strauss in the latter.
Early life
Robert John Downey Jr. was born on April 4, 1965, in Manhattan, New York City, the younger of two children. His father, Robert Downey Sr., was an actor and filmmaker, while his mother, Elsie Ann (née Ford), was an actress who appeared in Downey Sr.'s films. Downey's father was of half Lithuanian Jewish, one-quarter Hungarian Jewish, and one-quarter Irish descent, while Downey's mother had Scottish, German, and Swiss ancestry. He and his older sister Allyson grew up in Greenwich Village.
During his childhood, Downey had minor roles in his father's films. He made his acting debut at the age of five, playing a sick puppy in the absurdist comedy Pound (1970), and then at seven appeared in the surrealist Western Greaser's Palace (1972). At the age of 10, he was living in England and studied classical ballet as part of a larger curriculum. He attended the Stagedoor Manor Performing Arts Training Center in upstate New York as a teenager. When his parents divorced in 1978, Downey moved to California with his father, but in 1982, he dropped out of Santa Monica High School, and moved back to New York to pursue an acting career full-time.
Downey and Kiefer Sutherland, who shared the screen in the 1988 drama 1969, were roommates for three years when Downey first moved to Hollywood to pursue his career in acting.
Career
1983–1995: Early work and critical acclaim
Downey began building upon theater roles, including in the short-lived off-Broadway musical American Passion at the Joyce Theater in 1983, produced by Norman Lear. In 1985, he was part of the new, younger cast hired for Saturday Night Live, but following a year of poor ratings and criticism of the new cast's comedic talents, he and most of the new crew were dropped and replaced. Rolling Stone magazine named Downey the worst SNL cast member in its entire run, stating that the "Downey Fail sums up everything that makes SNL great." That same year, Downey had a dramatic acting breakthrough when he played James Spader's character's sidekick in Tuff Turf and then a bully in John Hughes's Weird Science. He was considered for the role of Duckie in John Hughes's film Pretty in Pink (1986), but his first lead role was with Molly Ringwald in The Pick-up Artist (1987). Because of these and other coming-of-age films Downey did during the 1980s, he is sometimes named as a member of the Brat Pack.
In 1987, Downey played Julian Wells, a rich boy whose life rapidly spirals out of his control, in the film version of the Bret Easton Ellis novel Less than Zero. His performance, described by Janet Maslin in The New York Times as "desperately moving", was widely praised. Zero drove Downey into films with bigger budgets and names, such as Chances Are (1989) with Cybill Shepherd and Ryan O'Neal, Air America (1990) with Mel Gibson, and Soapdish (1991) with Sally Field, Kevin Kline, Cathy Moriarty, and Whoopi Goldberg.
In 1992, he starred as Charlie Chaplin in Chaplin, a role for which he prepared extensively, learning how to play the violin as well as tennis left-handed. He had a personal coach in order to help him imitate Chaplin's posture and way of carrying himself. The role garnered Downey an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor at the Academy Awards 65th ceremony, losing to Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman.
In 1993, he appeared in the films Heart and Souls with Alfre Woodard and Kyra Sedgwick and Short Cuts with Matthew Modine and Julianne Moore, along with a documentary that he wrote about the 1992 presidential campaigns titled The Last Party (1993). He starred in the 1994 films, Only You with Marisa Tomei, and Natural Born Killers with Woody Harrelson. He then subsequently appeared in Restoration (1995), Richard III (1995), Home for the Holidays (1995), Two Girls and a Guy (1997), as Special Agent John Royce in U.S. Marshals (1998), and in Black and White (1999).
2001–2007: Resurgence
After five years of hiatus in his career, Downey returned to the big screen in the mid-2000s .
Downey was cast in a number of leading and supporting roles, including well-received work in a number of semi-independent films: A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Good Night, and Good Luck, Richard Linklater's dystopian, rotoscoped A Scanner Darkly, and Steven Shainberg's fictional biographical film of Diane Arbus, Fur, in which Downey's character represented the two biggest influences on Arbus's professional life, Lisette Model and Marvin Israel. Downey also received great notice for his roles in more mainstream fare such as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Disney's poorly received The Shaggy Dog.
On November 23, 2004, Downey released his debut musical album, The Futurist, on Sony Classical, for which he designed the cover art and designed the track listing label on the CD with his son Indio. The album received mixed reviews, but Downey stated in 2006 that he probably will not do another album, as he felt that the energy he put into doing the album was not compensated.
In 2006, Downey returned to television when he did voice acting in an episode of Family Guy. Downey had previously telephoned the show's production staff and asked if he could produce or assist in an episode creation, as his son Indio is a fan of the show. The producers of the show accepted the offer and created the character of Patrick Pewterschmidt, Lois Griffin's long lost, mentally disturbed brother, for Downey.
Downey signed on with publishers HarperCollins to write a memoir, which in 2006, was already being billed as a "candid look at the highs and lows of his life and career". In 2008, however, Downey returned his advance to the publishers, and canceled the book without further comment.
In 2007, Downey appeared in David Fincher's mystery thriller Zodiac, which was based on a true story. He played the role of San Francisco Chronicle journalist Paul Avery, who was reporting the Zodiac Killer case.
2008–2019: Iron Man and further success
Despite all of the critical success Downey had experienced throughout his career, he had not appeared in a "blockbuster" film. That changed in 2008 when Downey starred in two critically and commercially successful films, Iron Man and Tropic Thunder. In the article Ben Stiller wrote for Downey's entry in the 2008 edition of The Time 100, he offered an observation on Downey's commercially successful summer at the box office:
Yes, Downey is Iron Man, but he really is Actor Man ... In the realm where box office is irrelevant and talent is king, the realm that actually means something, he has always ruled, and finally this summer he gets to have his cake and let us eat him up all the way to the multiplex, where his mastery is in full effect.
In 2007, Downey was cast as the title character in the film Iron Man, with director Jon Favreau explaining the choice by stating: "Downey wasn't the most obvious choice, but he understood what makes the character tick. He found a lot of his own life experience in 'Tony Stark'." Favreau insisted on having Downey as he repeatedly claimed that Downey would be to Iron Man what Johnny Depp is to the Pirates of the Caribbean series: a lead actor who could both elevate the quality of the film and increase the public's interest in it. For the role, Downey had to gain more than 20 pounds (9 kilograms) of muscle in five months to look like he "had the power to forge iron".
Iron Man was released worldwide between April 30 and May 3, 2008, grossing over $585 million worldwide and receiving rave reviews which cited Downey's performance as a highlight of the film. By October 2008, Downey had agreed to star in two Iron Man sequels, as part of the Iron Man franchise, as well as The Avengers, featuring the superhero team that Stark joins, based on Marvel's comic book series The Avengers. He first reprised the role in a small appearance as Iron Man's alter ego Tony Stark in the 2008 film The Incredible Hulk, as a part of Marvel Studios' depicting the same Marvel Universe on film by providing continuity among the movies.
After Iron Man, Downey appeared alongside Ben Stiller and Jack Black in the Stiller-directed Tropic Thunder. The three actors play a Hollywood archetype – with Downey playing self-absorbed multi-Oscar-winning Australian method actor Kirk Lazarus – as they star in an extremely expensive Vietnam-era film called Tropic Thunder. Released in the United States on August 13, 2008, Tropic Thunder received good reviews. It earned US$26 million in its North American opening weekend and retained the number one position for its first three weekends of release. The film grossed $180 million in theaters before its release on home video on November 18, 2008. Downey was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance.
Opening in late April 2009 was a film Downey finished in mid-2008, The Soloist. The film was delayed from a November 2008 release by Paramount Pictures due to the studio's tight end-of-year release schedule. Critics who had seen the film in 2008 were mentioning it as a possible Academy Award candidate. Downey picked up an Academy Award nomination for the 2008 release year for his role in Tropic Thunder.
The first role Downey accepted after Iron Man was Sherlock Holmes in Guy Ritchie's adaptation Sherlock Holmes. Warner Bros. released it on December 25, 2009. The film set several box office records in the United States for a Christmas Day release, beating the previous record-holder, 2008's Marley & Me, by nearly $10 million, and finished second to Avatar in a record-setting Christmas weekend box office. Sherlock Holmes ended up being the 8th highest-grossing film of 2009. When Downey won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for his role as Sherlock Holmes, he noted in his acceptance speech that he had prepared no remarks because "Susan Downey told me that Matt Damon was going to win so don't bother preparing a speech".
Downey returned as Tony Stark in the first of two planned sequels to Iron Man, Iron Man 2, which released in May 2010. Iron Man 2 grossed over $623 million worldwide, becoming the 7th highest-grossing film of 2010. Downey's other commercial film release of 2010 was the comedy road film, Due Date. The movie, co-starring Zach Galifianakis, was released in November 2010 and grossed over $211M worldwide, making it the 36th highest-grossing movie of 2010. Downey's sole 2011 film credit was Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, which opened worldwide on December 16, 2011.
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In 2012, Downey reprised the role of Tony Stark in The Avengers. The film received positive reviews and was highly successful at the box office, becoming the third highest-grossing film of all time both in the United States and worldwide. His film, the David Dobkin-directed dramedy The Judge, a project co-produced by his production company Team Downey, was the opening film at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014. Downey played Tony Stark again in Iron Man 3 (2013), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Captain America: Civil War (2016), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), and Avengers: Endgame (2019). Three of his scenes from The Avengers and Avengers: Endgame were used as archive footage in the first episode of the Disney+ series Loki.
Downey hosted The Age of A.I., a YouTube documentary series released in 2019.
2020–present: post-Marvel
In 2020, Downey starred in Dolittle, playing the titular character, depicted in the film as a 19th-century Welsh veterinarian who can communicate with animals. This was the second film from Team Downey. It was a box office disappointment and received negative reviews from critics, who called it "too long [and] lifeless". In 2023, Downey portrayed antagonistic bureaucrat Lewis Strauss in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, with his performance receiving critical acclaim. For the role, he won a Golden Globe Award, BAFTA Award, Screen Actors Guild Award, and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Downey will next co-star in the television adaptation of novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel, The Sympathizer. It was also announced he would star in the film Play Dirty, reuniting with Shane Black, the director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Iron Man 3.
Other ventures
Music
Downey has sung on several soundtracks for his films, including for Chaplin, Too Much Sun, Two Girls and a Guy, Friends and Lovers, The Singing Detective, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. In 2001, he appeared in the music video for Elton John's song, "I Want Love". He released a CD in 2004 called The Futurist, and while promoting his film Tropic Thunder, he and his co-stars Ben Stiller and Jack Black were back-up singers "The Pips" to Gladys Knight singing "Midnight Train to Georgia".
Downey's most commercially successful recording venture to date (combining sales and radio airplay) has been his remake of the 1973 Joni Mitchell Christmas song "River", which was included on the Ally McBeal tie-in album Ally McBeal: A Very Ally Christmas, released in 2000; Downey's character Larry Paul performs the song in the Ally McBeal episode "Tis the Season".
Business
On June 14, 2010, Downey and his wife Susan opened their own production company called Team Downey. Their first project was The Judge. In 2024, Downey launched a coffee company named Happy with Craig Dubitsky.
Personal life
Relationships and family
Downey started dating actress Sarah Jessica Parker in 1984 after meeting her on the set of Firstborn. The couple later separated in 1991.
Downey married actress and singer Deborah Falconer on May 29, 1992, after a 42-day courtship. Their son was born in September 1993. The strain on their marriage from Downey's repeated trips to rehab and jail finally reached a breaking point; in 2001 Falconer left Downey and took their son with her. Downey and Falconer finalized their divorce on April 26, 2004.
In 2003, Downey met producer Susan Downey (née Levin), an executive vice-president of production at Joel Silver's film company, Silver Pictures, on the set of Gothika. Though Susan twice turned down his romantic advances, she and Downey did quietly strike up a romance during production. Despite Susan's worries that the romance would not last after the completion of shooting given that "he's an actor; I have a real job", the couple's relationship continued after production wrapped on Gothika, and Downey proposed to Susan on the night before her thirtieth birthday. In August 2005, the couple were married, in a Jewish ceremony, at Amagansett, New York. A tattoo on one of his biceps reads "Suzie Q" in tribute to her. The Downeys' first child, a son, was born in February 2012, and their second, a daughter, was born in November 2014.
Downey has been a close friend of Mel Gibson since they starred in Air America. In October 2011, Downey was being honored at the 25th American Cinematheque Awards; Downey chose Gibson to present him with his award for his life's work and used his air time to say a few kind words about Gibson and explain why he chose him to present the award.
Environmentalism
In January 2020, during the promotions of his film Dolittle, Downey announced that he had made the decision to adopt a vegan diet, in response to the debate about the climate crisis, stating that "I'm a one-man carbon footprint nightmare colossus" and believes he can do his part to contribute. Downey previously announced his opening of Footprint Coalition, an organization he launched to reduce carbon footprints around the world using advanced technology. The Footprint Coalition promotes technologies that protect the environment such as French insect-farming startup Ynsect, the bio-based alternative to plastic manufacturer RWDC, and bamboo toilet paper manufacturer Cloud Paper.
In January 2024, Downey stated that he was a pescetarian and had to give up his vegan diet due to low levels of vitamin B12, calcium and iron. He co-authored Cool Food: Erasing Your Carbon Footprint One Bite at a Time which advocates a low-carbon plant-based diet to reduce carbon footprint.
Filmography and awards
Downey has appeared in over 70 films over the course of his career. According to Rotten Tomatoes, Downey's most commercially successful films include Tropic Thunder, Oppenheimer, the Sherlock Holmes film series, and several Marvel Studios films, including Captain America: Civil War and the Iron Man and Avengers series. Downey's films have grossed over $14 billion worldwide, making him the third highest-grossing actor of all time according to The Numbers. He was named Hollywood's highest paid actor by Forbes from 2013 to 2015. Downey has also appeared in several critically acclaimed films, including "Sr.", Richard III, True Believer, Short Cuts, Good Night, and Good Luck, Oppenheimer, and some Marvel Studios films, such as Iron Man, Avengers: Endgame, The Avengers, and Captain America: Civil War. He has received various accolades, including two Screen Actors Guild Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards. Downey is among a selection of Jewish actors nominated at the Academy Awards, as well as one of the few actors to have received at least three acting Oscar nominations.
Discography
Studio album
- The Futurist (2004)
Soundtrack appearances
| Year | Song | Soundtrack | Notes |
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| 1992 | "Smile" | Chaplin OST | On The Futurist |
| 1993 | "The Star-Spangled Banner" | Heart and Souls OST | With B.B. King |
| 2000 | "White Christmas" | Ally McBeal: A Very Ally Christmas | With Vonda Shepard |
| "River" | |||
| 2001 | "Every Breath You Take" | Ally McBeal: For Once in My Life featuring Vonda Shepard | With Sting |
| "Chances Are" | With Vonda Shepard | ||
| "Snakes" | |||
| 2003 | "In My Dreams" | The Singing Detective OST | |
| 2005 | "Broken" | Kiss Kiss Bang Bang OST | On The Futurist |
See also
In Spanish: Robert Downey Jr. para niños
