Depp gambled his reputation on last summer’s libel trial of the century Credit: Getty It feels portentous now watching Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands, seeing the peculiar tenderness he brought to a role that turned him from ’80s heart-throb into ’90s indie icon (and earned him his first major awards nomination – a Golden Globe for best actor). In Scissorhands (1990), Depp plays a fragile loner whose strangeness makes him captivating, yet ultimately isolates him. It was a part for which Depp seemed destined (although, weirdly, Tim Burton wanted Tom Cruise to play it), propelling him to other roles as eccentric outsiders that came to define him. In What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), Ed Wood (1994) and Donnie Brasco (1997), he was sealed in the public imagination as a wounded hero, personifying the ’90s grunge backlash against ’80s pop. For biographer Michael Blitz, Depp encapsulated an era: ‘The curious by-product of conflicting forces in American popular culture and, to a lesser extent, European pop culture.’