Meet the new Candy Man, Johnny Depp

'School was a torment,' he remembers. 'We moved often - lived in more than 20 houses in my first 15 years - and I never felt accepted.' When he was 15, his parents divorced, and Johnny was raised by his mother. 'All her life, she was a waitress in little diners,' he says, 'but I won't let her wait tables anymore.'

At age 17, Depp became a rock musician. 'I started playing guitar in the Baptist church where my uncle preached. Then I played in a garage band called "The Kids". Playing the guitar helped me to discover who and what I was. It's one of the true loves of my life.'

He married at 20 and divorced at 23, by which time he had found his way into acting. Broken engagements to Jennifer Grey, Winona Ryder and Kate Moss followed as Depp's private life threatened to spiral out of control. On-screen he was heralded as a genius, off-screen he was an alcoholic and a depressive.

'It's too easy to blame other people and things in your past for your own self-loathing,' says Depp. 'When I was drinking heavily, I was just in a really bad frame of mind and using alcohol to deaden whatever I was feeling at the time.

'I didn't really know how to handle the process of going from a nobody to someone who's suddenly famous and getting paid more money than he knows what to do with and having people stare at you when you're sitting in a café. I don't even really know why I was doing it except that I wasn't happy and so drank to escape that feeling.'

It was his friends and family who eventually put Depp back on his feet. 'The thing is, you never think you're on the verge of disaster while you're looking over the edge yourself,' he continues. 'It was other people who were trying to get me to stop and after a while it kind of sank in and I just cleaned up my act. But that didn't really solve the problem which was that I was unhappy with the way my life was going and didn't see any great relief on the horizon.

'That all changed when I met Vanessa. I pretty much fell in love with her the moment I set eyes on her. As a person I was pretty much a lost cause at that point of my life.' He continued 'she turned all that around for me with her incredible tenderness and understanding. She made me feel like a real human being instead of someone Hollywood had manufactured.

At 42, Depp is still regarded as one of the world's sexiest men. It's not a tag he is particularly proud of or one he's worried about losing as he grows older. 'I love growing old, getting some lines in my face, watching my kids grow up,' he says. 'I think you have to accept getting older because there's isn't anything you can really do about it anyway'. He added with a laugh 'And if it bothers you, it's just a question of surgery, isn't it?'

The annoying truth is that Depp still looks as sexy as ever. After getting his start as a teeney-bopper heartthrob on the TV show 21 Jump Street in America, he's constructed a career that carefully disassembles the pretty boy image; playing misfits, outsiders and weirdos.

Right now he has a mouth full of gold teeth and has grown his hair long and unkempt for a second swashbuckling adventure as Jack Sparrow in back-to-back Pirates of the Caribbean sequels. 'He's someone I've looked forward to re-visiting,' Depp says. 'What's fun about the character is his outrageousness. I really connected with him and I've missed the guy.'

Depp now finds himself more in demand as an actor than ever before. And he is lucky to be in a place where he can handle the pressure of fame - something he struggled to do in his old guise.

'I still have those guys with the cameras staking me out and watching the house - even when we're in France,' says Depp. 'The difference now is I'm trying not to let myself get worked up about it anymore. That just makes them even more money so some of them try to provoke you that way. I've stopped playing into their hands by giving value to a photo of me. I'm just trying to be a boring family guy'

Photograph © Warner Bros