River Phoenix: The Tragic Life and Lost Potential of a Unique Talent

2023-08-20 08:30:00

Broke by an overdose at 23, this unique talent should have played two roles that made the glory of… Leonardo DiCaprio.

Photonews

On October 31, 1993, River Phoenix, who would have been 53 on August 23, died of an overdose of cocaine, heroin and morphine. A tragedy occurred in the club “The Viper Room”, located on Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles, of which Johnny Depp was, at the time, one of the owners.

River had come there with his girlfriend Samantha Mathis, with his brother Joaquin and his sister Rain (he was their eldest), and with John Frusciante, then guitarist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, with whom he had “consumed” for several days. At one point he told musician Bob Forrest that he wasn’t feeling well, and a few minutes later Samantha found him convulsing on the sidewalk. Joaquin called an ambulance, Rain gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and, once there, paramedics saw that he had suffered a heart attack. He was given medicine to restart his heart, which stopped at Cedars-Sinai Hospital at 1:51 a.m.

Raped at 4 years old

Nobody today can say with certainty what the career of this broke actor would have looked like at 23 years old. But what is certain is that his singular talent, his naturalness and his wounds have left an indelible mark in his fourteen films. The last, “Dark Blood”, which he had finished filming in New Mexico just before his death, was not shown until 2012. And one of his first, the one who revealed it, was is “Stand by me”, released in 1986, which Tipik is pleased to rebroadcast.

He plays a 14-year-old teenager, Chris Chambers, who, with three friends, searches for a boy their age who is probably dead. “I identified so much with my character that if I hadn’t had to go home to my family following filming, I probably should have seen a psychiatrist,” he commented. However, it is not a secret: his family has not been the most reassuring. When he was a baby, she joined the Children of God sect in Venezuela, where he was sexually abused at age 4 by kids barely older than him. Chilling.

In the wake of “Stand by me”, of which he is, according to the “Washington Post”, the center of gravity, he plays the son of Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren in “The Mosquito Coast”, by Peter Weir, who declares: “Laurence Olivier never had what River has. “On the set of this film, he begins, with his partner Martha Plimpton, an idyll which will last for years. With “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989), he found Harrison Ford, of which he is the child version of the character and, in 1991, gave the reply to Keanu Reeves in “My Own Private Idaho”.

Two weeks following his death, he was to begin filming “Interview with the Vampire” as journalist Malloy, which reverted to Christian Slater. The latter paid his entire salary, or €225,000, to two environmental organizations dear to River. If fate had decided otherwise, he would also have had to play Andy Warhol for Gus Van Sant, the character of Leonardo DiCaprio in “Basketball Diaries” and… Jack Dawson in “Titanic”. Capsizing.

« Stand by me », 20 août, 20h05, Tipik.

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