When they “amicably separated” the following year, he and Heard quietly dated were first seen holding hands at a Rolling Stones concert in April 2013. The pair’s “insane chemistry” was spotted from the start, but Depp was with his partner of 14 years, Vanessa Paradis. Heard reportedly beat Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley to the role of Chenault and was personally selected by Depp. In 2011 she met Depp on the set of comedy-drama The Rum Diary. Certainly, not something you would find in somebody her age”. Its director Jonathan Levine said he’d chosen Heard for the lead because “there was a certain type of beauty and a certain type of innate intelligence that is not something you find every day. That year, she won a breakthrough award at the Hollywood Film Festival.Īmong other 2008 appearances was horror film All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, picked for distribution by Harvey Weinstein but then dropped. Her big break came with two box-office hits in 2008: martial arts drama Never Back Down and stoner comedy Pineapple Express, playing Seth Rogan’s high-school girlfriend. Within two years she was in American football drama Friday Night Lights and played the younger version of Charlize Theron’s character in North Country, a film about sexual harassment, discrimination and social justice.
After completing a home-study diploma in New York she moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting and, despite her lack of contacts and her parents’ scepticism, began to be cast in film and TV roles. Heard insists she had no interest in modelling. “I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” she says of the Big Apple. At that time she started sending headshots to modelling agencies (she’d taken part in beauty pageants as a child) and at 17 dropped out of high school to move to New York, which thrilled her from the moment she began visiting the city to meet agents. Raised a Roman Catholic, she declared herself an atheist, and began reading books by Ayn Rand, Ray Bradbury and George Orwell. That was a ridiculous idea to me.”Īt 16, Heard’s best friend died in a car crash, and it had a profound effect. “I was always into older men as a teenager,” Heard once said, before going on to marry Depp, 22 years her senior. Her father taught her to ride horses “aggressively” and drive pick-up trucks, and scared off potential suitors with his penchant for shotguns. They were fishing, camping and hunting companions (hunting is their bonding activity to this day), and Heard, though a self-described “girly-girl”, was raised to be tenacious. A keen hunter and horse broker, he liked to treat middle daughter Amber as the son he never had. Their mother Patricia worked in telecommunications for the state and their father David ran a small construction firm. It was a conservative area, “a very monotone presentation of society”, and she still recalls the first time she saw a Muslim woman in a hijab. Heard, 34, and her sister Whitney, 31, were raised in Texas, about 40 miles outside of the state capital Austin. Heard has detailed instances of “disgusting” verbal and physical abuse she has allegedly suffered at the hands of Johnny Depp while giving evidence. The court has heard her side of the case, brought by Depp over a Washington Post article in which his ex-wife claimed she was a victim of domestic violence. This week, though, it has been Heard’s chance to speak for herself.
So far the jury has heard a series of explosive details from a string of witnesses including the couple’s former marriage counsellor, friends and Depp himself.
Over the last few weeks, Heard has been seen smiling but silent as she arrives at the court in Fairfax, Virginia for the latest stage of her five-week, $50m defamation trial brought by ex-husband Johnny Depp. For the Hollywood actress whose career includes The Danish Girl and box office record-breaker Aquaman, the coming weeks will be her greatest starring role to date. The woman at the centre of the decade’s most salacious defamation trial has taken the witness stand - and the world is watching Amber Heard.