Robert Downey Jr.

Robert Downey Jr. (born April 4, 1965) is an American actor whose career traced one of Hollywood’s most documented falls and recoveries. The son of underground filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., he emerged as a gifted young actor in the 1980s, briefly joined Saturday Night Live, drew strong reviews for Less Than Zero (1987), and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for playing the title role in Chaplin (1992).

From 1996 onward, drug addiction overtook his career through the public record of arrests and incarceration. He was arrested in 1996 on drug and weapons charges, served jail time in 1997 for missing court-ordered drug tests, and after a relapse was sentenced in 1999 to a term that included roughly a year at the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility in Corcoran. Further arrests in late 2000 and April 2001 led to his dismissal from the television series Ally McBeal and left him, by industry accounts, effectively uninsurable.

Downey’s recovery is generally dated to his decision to get sober in 2003. That year, Mel Gibson personally backed the insurance bond that allowed him to star in The Singing Detective when studios would not take the risk. A well-received turn in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) reestablished his standing, and Iron Man (2008) made him the centerpiece of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The role of Tony Stark, reprised across a string of Marvel films, helped make Downey one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood in the mid-2010s. In 2024 he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Oppenheimer, completing a comeback from near career-ending addiction to the top of his profession.

Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash rose from Sun Records in the mid-1950s to become one of the defining voices of American music, but his career was nearly destroyed twice and rebuilt twice. The first collapse came from a decade of amphetamine and barbiturate addiction in the 1960s that wrecked his health, his first marriage, and his reliability as a performer.

His first comeback was anchored in a hard-won, partial sobriety, helped by June Carter, and crystallized in two live prison albums: At Folsom Prison in 1968 and At San Quentin in 1969. They returned him to the top of the charts and led to a network television variety show on ABC. For a few years he was again a giant.

A second decline followed in the late 1970s and 1980s. Relapses recurred, his record sales faded, and in 1986 his longtime label, Columbia Records, dropped him after nearly three decades. He spent years recording for smaller labels with diminishing commercial impact, written off by much of the industry as a nostalgia act.

The second comeback was the most improbable. In 1994, producer Rick Rubin paired the aging Cash with stark, stripped-down recordings under the American Recordings series, reaching a young rock audience. The arc peaked with his 2002 cover of Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt, a late-career masterpiece, before his death in September 2003.