Robert Downey Jr. he’s always been a better person through his actions than his interviews. Over the years, his comeback story has been told and retold in Hollywood, his arrest, his arrest, his imprisonment, his blacklisting, and then his improbable rise to become one of the world’s most famous stars. But it was at the 96th Academy Awards in March 2024, after winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as Lewis Strauss in Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’, that he broke down his entire life into a few sentences and one joke that wasn’t a joke at all.The word of the day is: “I want to thank my veterinarian, I mean wife, Susan Downeythere. She got me as a rescue pet, and she loved me back when I was alive. That’s why I’m here.”For anyone who knew what the words were actually referring to, it wasn’t just talk. It was an acknowledgment and a word of thanks written in two sentences.
The meaning of Robert Downey Jr.’s quote of the day.
The metaphor Downey chose is not self-indulgent, and that’s the point. He is not talking about someone who stumbled a little and needed a gentle nudge. The word “snarling” is an image of something that has learned, through repeated experiences, not to trust anything that comes close, a person that has been wounded enough times to meet the world protectively, with teeth. And Downey says the same color, not the beautiful color, not the artistic color, but the closed, damaged, dysfunctional color, like the one Susan chose to love. The words “loved me in life” have their own power. Not “it helped me care.” Not “to help my recovery.” Back to life. Just like it was beforeit wasn’t really alive, and what came after it was.
After being fired by the industry, Robert Downey Jr. Portrait (Robert Downey Jr.)
Robert Downey Jr. by Susan Downey: a love story and everything before it
To understand why that word got there, you have to understand what it was like before Susan Levin got involved. According to People, Downey was arrested several times for drug offenses and cycled out of prison in the late 1990s, and after repeatedly missing court-ordered drug tests he was sentenced to three years in prison in 1999, and spent one year at the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility. At that time, his wife left and took their son. She lost her role on ‘Ally McBeal’ and was struggling with huge debt and debt repayments. When he returned to Hollywood he was homeless, he had no home, and no money to protect him, and it was Mel Gibson who put a roof over his head and paid the insurance to cast him in ‘The Singing Detective’.This is the person who walked on the band ‘Gothika’ in 2003. Not a star that stumbled. Someone who lost almost everything, and who most of the industry quietly wrote off as good. Susan was the producer of the film, her first full-credit production job, and at first she found him interesting but strange, a man who brought his oatmeal to lunch in Montreal and did yoga on the table. She rejected his advances twice, fearing that the relationship could not take off, before the couple went public at the end of 2003. What followed was not a slow affair. He was a wreck. Choose medicine or choose, a moment of truth that reaches deeper than professional results.
The couple got married in 2005 and have been one of the longest-lasting partnerships in Hollywood, combining family life with a successful partnership. Portrait (Robert Downey Jr.)
Downey proposed the night before his 30th birthday. They got married in August 2005, and since then he has not used drugs. Together they have two children, son Exton, born in 2012, and daughter Avri, born in 2014. Robert also has a son, Indio, from his first marriage.Downey praised Susan directly and without qualifications, saying that he owes a large part, if not all, of his success to her, and his unofficial name in Hollywood, according to Harper’s Bazaar, is “The Miracle That Saved Robert Downey Jr.” The work that followed, ‘Iron Man’, ‘Sherlock Holmes’, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and finally the third Oscar nomination that won, was built on the basis of a single man who decided to stay when he was not smart enough.The line veterinarian at the Oscars laughed at the creation. But the next line isn’t meant to get laughs. It was designed to tell the truth in a room where the truth is not naked. He lived when the factories were gone. He stayed when the numbers were not heard. He sat, and the rescue animal slowly felt it was safe to stop crying. This is the part of the story that the Oscar statue represents. Not the talent, which was always there. A life that had to be rebuilt around them, one decision at a time, and someone who chose to love what was hard to love.
