a new hope

PhoenixRising

River was the same age as me. We were both born in 1970, and he was born two months after I was. Yeah, his parents were hippies who belonged to the Children of God cult in the 1960s, so they had some weird names. His brother is Joaquin Phoenix, and his sisters are named Summer and Rain.

He'd been acting in television since 1981 when he was in a short lived CBS show called Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, which got cancelled after one season. After that he did mostly TV movies, like an episode of ABC Afterschool Specials called 'Backwards: The Riddle of Dyslexia,' where he played a kid who discovers that he's dyslexic. Then there was 'Surviving,' where he played the a supporting role of the younger brother of Zach Galligan's(Gremlins) character who ended up in a double suicide with his girlfriend, played by Molly Ringwald, because their family situations were becoming intolerable and they were also faced with the possibility of being separated, so Zach and Molly's characters both killed themselves in a parked car in a garage by carbon monoxide poisoning. And there was another TV movie called Circle of Violence: A Family Drama, where he played an angsty and unmanageable teenage son of a woman named Georgia, who had been physically abused as a child and began physically abusing her own elderly mother.

River's first cinematic role came in 1985 when he was cast in a science fiction movie called Explorers, directed by Joe Dante(Gremlins, The Howling). But the film had the bad luck of opening the same summer as Back To The Future and The Goonies, and the film itself was never finished and ran behind schedule, and ended up being released without a proper final act, so it naturally flopped. But his big break was in 1986's Stand By Me, which became a sleeper hit that summer and launched River into stardom, along with his co-stars, Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O'Connell. After that, River did a couple of films that went nowhere, he earned an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for Running On Empty(even though he was the lead), and had his most successful role as young Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

But his career was never the same after that. Aside from a critically acclaimed performance in My Own Private Idaho with Keanu Reeves and pretty good ensemble heist film called Sneakers, with Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, and Dan Aykroyd, most of River's films at the end of his life were mediocre and forgettable until his death from a drug overdose in 1993 outside of Johnny Depp's Viper Room nightclub. Ironically, many of the films he was slated to appear in ended up being done by other actors following his death. He wanted the role of Lestat in Interview With The Vampire, but Tom Cruise got the role instead, and River was offered the role of the interviewer, which later went to Christian Slater. River didn't want that role anyway. But many other roles that River was up for ended up going to none other than Leonardo DiCaprio, of all people.

a new hope

That sucks

sum1

Yeah, River dying of drugs was big news.

a new hope

It's sad how many lives drugs ruin.

sum1

Yeah!

a new hope

Especially in Hollywood with all that pressure...

sum1

There's a lot of that. Robert Downey Jr was in prison over drugs before he turned his life around.

a new hope

Yeah I remember seeing some interviews about that...

sum1

Iron Man was in jail.

a new hope

He gets annoyed now when people ask him about his past because he just wants to move on from it and it's been ages...

sum1

Yeah, it's been quite a while.

a new hope

Yeah I remember him actually walking out of an interview that was supposed to be about one of his projects and the guy kept asking about his healthy problems.

PhoenixRising

Well, Downey has no one to blame but himself for that. His dad didn't help either, getting high with his son back when they were living in Greenwich Village, NYC.

But River was just a total waste. Man, what I could've done if I'd been in his position, with those looks and that hair and that talent.

a new hope

I don't think he has himself to blame for being asked about it for the rest of his life. He got clean. The initial mistake was his but he got his life together.