Hollywood (United States) (AFP)
Enigmatic star with an imposing presence, Joaquin Phoenix won the Oscar for best actor on Sunday for his performance as a violent and tortured antihero in “Joker”, one of the troubled roles in which he excelled and which established his reputation.
Critics of the film and its central character, sworn enemy of Batman – accused of presenting a murderer in too favorable a light – have not prevented Hollywood from distinguishing the actor with intense play, rewarded with numerous prizes for “Joker” , including a Golden Globe.
“I am overflowing with gratitude,” he said, visibly moved, when he received the precious statuette. “I don’t know what I would be” without the love of cinema, he said.
Impressive and disturbing at will in this role for which he did not save himself, the American actor of 45 years said that his first challenge had been to lose weight to better embody a sickly Joker with angular physique.
He then documented himself on the different profiles of murderers, before identifying one and then moving away from it to “have freedom”. “I didn’t want a psychiatrist to identify what type of personality it was,” he said at the Venice film festival, where “Joker” won first prize.
One of the key elements to interpret his cruel laugh so unique.
“It took me a long time, I didn’t want to make it, I wanted to find it,” he said.
Born October 28, 1974 in Puerto Rico, in the Caribbean, Joaquin, third in a family of five, grew up in a hippie family, follower of the sect of “children of God” who spends his life on the roads of America North, before settling in Los Angeles.
There, the parents call on an agent to launch the artistic career of their offspring, with some success, since Joaquin and his four-year-old elder, River, were hired in two television films in 1982 and 1984.
In 1986, Joaquin, renamed “Leaf”, appeared in the film “Spacecamp”, then in 1989 in “Ron Spit Portrait of a Model Family”.
But his career remains behind that of River, star of “My own private Idaho” (Gus Van Sant, 1991) after playing the young Indiana Jones in “The last crusade” (1989).
In 1993, he died of an overdose. Joaquin’s desperate call to the emergency services, then only 19 years old, is sold to the media and is looped on radio and television. Traumatized, the young actor steps back from the studios.
He returned in 1995, facing Nicole Kidman, in “Prête à tout” by Gus Van Sant. He then shines in the roles of dark characters: as a bad boy in “U-Turn” by Oliver Stone and especially as an enemy emperor of Russell Crowe in “Gladiator” (2000), which earned him his first Oscar nomination.
The same year, with “The Yards”, it turns for the first time under the direction of James Gray, of which it will become one of the fetish actors.
– False descent into hell –
The dedication comes in 2005 for the actor, chosen to play Johnny Cash, who disappeared two years earlier at the age of 71. Phoenix learned to play guitar and sing for six months and won the Golden Globe for best actor and a Grammy.
The character’s only sprain: strictly vegan, the actor demands to wear synthetic clothes and not leather, like those of Johnny Cash.
Become a headliner in Hollywood, Joaquin Phoenix then embarks on a crazy project. He announced that he would stop filming for a career in hip-hop.
For two years, the media described his descent into hell, between catastrophic concerts, excess of all kinds and chaotic interviews. A thick figure and a long beard, he shows himself stammering, haggard, during an American television program. He will resume this appearance for “You Were Never Really Here”, a psychological thriller in which he embodies a traumatized and mutilated Iraq veteran.
Everything is only artifice. Joaquin Phoenix is secretly shooting a fake documentary (“I’m still here”, 2010), under the direction of his brother-in-law at the time, Casey Affleck, and is pushing the performance to embody his character off the board.
In 2012, he won the interpretation prize at the Venice festival for his role in “The Master” by Paul Thomas Anderson, jointly with Philip Seymour Hoffman, who then confided: “it scares me, and it’s a good thing “.
© 2020 AFP
–
