Despite decades of work in Hollywood and a 1992 Oscar nomination (for Chaplin), Downey, then forty-one, had an almost perfect record of commercial failure and a well-publicized reputation as a substance abuser. Most famously, under the influence in 1996, he broke into the house of a neighboring family in Malibu and passed out in an empty bed belonging to an eleven-year-old child. In 2001, after another drug arrest, he was fired from the TV show Ally McBeal. But he had cleaned up, married the whip-smart producer Susan Levin, and gradually worked his way back into Hollywood’s good graces.
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