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Most Inspirational People

          ↳ Robert Downey Jr.

Robert John Downey Jr. was born on April 4th, 1965 in New York City. His father was an underground filmmaker, and his mother was an actress. During his childhood, Robert was constantly surrounded by drugs, and when he was about six years old he was introduced to marijuana by his father. This was the start He mostly abused cocaine, and by 1995 had started abusing black tar heroin. He was arrested on numerous occasions for drug possession and other felonies. On July 16, 1996, the infamous “Goldilocks Incident” occurred when Robert accidentally fell asleep in a child’s bed in his neighbor’s house. He was subsequnetly arrested and was placed on probation. He was arrested several more times, until finally he was sentenced to spend 3 years in California’s Corcoran State Prison in 1999. Robert explained his addiction to the court by saying: ”It’s like I’ve got a shotgun in my mouth, with my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal.” He got out of prison on a $5,000 bail after an appeals court ruled that he had done enough time beforehand in rehabilitation facilities to fulfill the 3 year sentence. However, that was not the end of his abuse of drugs nor the end of his arrests. After a final arrest in April 2001, Robert knew that if he didn’t control his addiction he would have to spend more time in jail or in rehab, so ”I finally said, ‘You know what? I don’t think I can continue doing this.’ And I reached out for help, and I ran with it…. You can reach out for help in kind of a half-assed way and you’ll get it and you won’t take advantage of it. It’s not that difficult to overcome these seemingly ghastly problems…what’s hard is to decide to actually do it.” He then started to make a comeback.

He finally returned to making films with the 2003 film The Singing Detective. Later that year, he made Gothika, and on the set he met producer Susan Levin, whom he later married in 2005. From then on he made mostly independent films, until he finally became, after more than 20 years of acting, a superstar when the block buster film Iron Man came out the summer of 2008. Since then, he has made many successful movies, including the Sherlock Holmes series as well as the record-breaking, box-office hit The Avengers.

Robert Downey Jr. is inspirational because he shows us, as he put it, “The lesson is that you can still make mistakes and be forgiven”. In Hollywood, being involved with drugs is not an uncommon thing to do: every day, we hear about how one troubled star just got arrested again, or how another was seen doing their community service. What is uncommon, however, is to see someone in Hollywood overcome their drug addiction and become respected and an even bigger success than they were before.

“The truth is, there isn’t really anything that anybody can’t survive.”