WHAT CHANCE DID ROBERT HAVE? HIS DAD GAVE HIM HIS FIRST JOINT

How Drugs Put An End To Downey's Movie Career

He was one of the most talented actors of his generation - a brilliant
young man feted by Hollywood's elite and tipped for greatness by all.

Robert Downey Jnr's remarkable professional skills were complemented by
intelligence, charm and wit. On or off the screen, he could always make the
crowd laugh.

When Lord Attenborough cast the handsome American as Charlie Chaplin in his
tour-de-force 1992 film about the life of Britain's best-known comic, his
performance won him an Oscar nomination and work offers galore.

At 27, Downey seemed on his way to major stardom. No one, except perhaps
the man himself, saw anything ahead but a glittering future.

But the past nine years have seen a shocking fall from grace, with Downey
apparently hell-bent on self-destruction and unable to do anything to halt
his heart-breaking decline.

This week, the sad plight of an actor once talked about as the next Brando
became sickeningly clear when he was found huddled in the foetal position
in a rat-infested alley, out of his mind on drugs.

Los Angeles police officers could hardly believe that the filthy figure
lying among ripped bin bags spewing garbage was the world-famous star of
Chaplin, Less Than Zero, Soapdish and Restoration.

When he was arrested and charged with possession and use of crack cocaine,
it was the latest in a series of catastrophic career-wrecking incidents.

He was instantly fired from a role which looked for a while to have offered
him a much-needed lifeline - that of Calista Flockhart's friend in the hit
TV series Ally McBeal.

There will be no way back this time. Hollywood has washed its hands of him.

And now the star who once lived in luxury homes and five-star hotels seems
destined to spend the rest of his sad and lonely existence in and out of
courtrooms, drug rehab centres and America's notoriously bleak jails.

The clues to how this fragile young acting genius came to self-destruct so
spectacularly are to be found in his blighted childhood.

His first experience of drugs was smoking a cannabis joint at the age of
six - with his father.

In adulthood, strung out on a lethal heroin and crack concoction nicknamed
punk speedball, Downey summed up his love-hate relationship with narcotics
memorably.

He said: "It's like I have a shotgun in my mouth, and I've got my finger on
the trigger and I like the taste of the gun metal.

"If you don't kill yourself, something else inevitably will. And no one
knows how to do it better or get it done quicker than yourself."

There has been nothing quick about his self-inflicted decline. The slide
into addiction began 30 years ago when his now-contrite father handed him
that joint.

Picture the scene. In the small hours of the morning, acclaimed film
director Robert Downey Snr is busy writing a script while smoking marijuana
and snorting cocaine to stay awake.

His little boy, in pyjamas, wanders in to see what his father is up to.

Downey Snr takes up the shocking story: "I'd have a little grass or take a
little coke to stay up and write, and what I wrote was gibberish, most of it.

"And he'd sit there, and he'd say: 'If you can do it, why can't I do it?'

"And I'd say: 'That's a good question, but why would you want to do it?'
And he'd say: 'Because I don't want to go to bed either.' What a shmuck I was."

Soon, drugs became an everyday part of young Robert's life. He moved on to
harder drugs. His father did nothing to stop him.

A friend from those days, Anthony D'Eugenio, reveals that Robert started
doing cocaine and drinking heavily in his early teens.

He recalls: "Nothing really took him over the edge. It just started from a
young age and then continued."

The speed with which he became addicted and crazed nature of his narcotic
abuse was eerily reflected in Robert's breakthrough role. In Less Than
Zero, he played a kid who always took more drugs than anyone else. Robert's
father says: "My son got into it, and that was horrible.

"But we never thought it was dangerous. We just thought it was stupid and fun."

Robert Downey Jnr began to realise that it wasn't all fun when police
stopped his car in Malibu in June 1996 and found cocaine, heroin and a gun.

While he was awaiting trial, he made things worse when he illegally entered
a neighbour's Malibu house and passed out on the empty bed of their
11-year-old son.

He was sent to a rehabilitation centre, but after two days he climbed out
of a window and escaped. He was recaptured and sent to Los Angeles County
Men's Central Jail for nine days.

Just months later, he was given six more months of live-in rehabilitation
and three years' probation. By repeatedly testing positive for drugs, he
had broken his parole.

In December 1997 he was given 180 days in jail. And in June 1999 he
admitted missing scheduled drug tests and was sentenced to three years at
the Corcoran Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison.

He came out last August, but was soon in trouble again - arrested for
possession of cocaine after he was discovered taking drugs in a hotel room
in Palm Springs, California.

The Mirror tracked down painter Mike Ridge, who shared that disastrous
crack-smoking session with the actor.

Downey - whom he had met only an hour earlier - cooked the crack by mixing
cocaine with baking soda and water and placing the ingredients in the
microwave. Ridge said: "Robert told me: 'You shouldn't do lines. You should
smoke crack - there are impurities in cocaine."

He could scarcely believe that the Oscar-nominated star had fallen so far
that he was reduced to smoking crack with strangers. But this is now a
typical scene in the actor's life.

Hollywood star Sean Penn, one of his closest friends, once told Downey to
his face: "You have two reputations. One as a talented actor and one as a
drug addict."

Amazingly, Downey thanked Penn for the comments. He'd taken them as a
compliment. Penn has been so concerned for the health of his friend that he
once broke into Downey's home to drag him off to rehab.

The one true love of his life was Sex In The City star Sarah Jessica
Parker. Despite his problems, they stayed together for almost a decade
before drugs drove them apart.

Downey married Deborah Falconer, and they have a seven-year-old son, Indio.
Deborah, 35, did not file for divorce until last January, but they
separated six years ago.

She once described Robert as "a well-meaning father with an under-
developed sense of responsibility"."

In the past 12 years, Downey has attended hundreds of recovery meetings.
Sometimes he goes for months without touching a drop of alcohol, but then
he suddenly relapses.

Now one of his friends has broken his silence to give a frank insight into
his life with drugs.

Tom Sizemore was close to him in in 1990 and recalls many lost days and
nights. He said their drug of choice was"punk speedballs, a cocktail of
crack and black-tar heroin.

He says: ""We did drugs basically by ourselves or with each other. "It
wasn't glamorous. It wasn't out in the open. It was quiet and kind of
desperate."

James Toback, who directed Downey in three films, including Black And White
in 1998, is frightened about his friend's future.

He says: "Robert's compulsiveness and his recklessness and his desire to
flirt with death are central to his powers as a liberated creator.

"The only person that he's hurt is himself. Jail is not a place, on any
level, that he belongs."

And Toback adds chillingly: "He's not afraid to die.""