River Phoenix As A Kid

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River Phoenix: actor, musician, free spirit, Hollywood rebel. A leading member of the 90s film world’s new generation of anti-establishment stars, he died at just 23-years-old, on 31st October, 1993.

Phoenix’s death was compared to that of James Dean, who died in 1955 at the age of just 24. The similarities between their deaths are impossible to miss.

The Phoenix family has been in the public eye for a very long time. River Phoenix was the first to make it big, but many of his siblings have become famous and successful in their own right. But even though many of the Phoenix children have found success, they've had to overcome a lot. 31 October 2020 Rolling Stone ‘Alone U Elope’: Watch the Lyric Video for River Phoenix’s Band, Aleka’s Attic. 28 September 2020 MovieWeb Joaquin Phoenix & Rooney Mara Name Baby Son After River Phoenix. 28 September 2020 The Wrap Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara Name First Child River in Touching Tribute to Actor’s Late Brother.

Both lived life in the fast lane. Both shared the same dark, brooding intensity. Both died young, cut down in the prime of life. Both were loners. Both had cult followings before and after death. River was a hippy, animal lover, vegetarian. He was Hollywood’s newest rebel.

Born 23rd August, 1970, in Madras, Oregon, Phoenix’s nickname as a child was Rio, which is Spanish for river. He had three sisters – Rainbow, Liberty and Summer – and a brother named Leaf (later to become Joaquin Phoenix, a successful actor in his own right).

Family life for River was complicated. The Phoenix children, along with their parents, Arlyn and John, spent much of their childhood in Venezuela, where Arlyn and John were missionaries for the Children of God cult. When asked about his childhood, River later said: “My upbringing was unconventional. It was filled with love, laughter and peace. It shaped me into the free spirit I am today.”

River’s acting career began in childhood, with his breakthrough film role coming in 1985, in the film Explorers.

Alongside a (very) young Ethan Hawke, Phoenix played a child science genius, who makes a spaceship from bits and bobs around the house. The film was well-received (if commercially unsuccessful), but it was Phoenix’s next film which shot him to fame of another level.

Stand by Me, based on Stephen King‘s short story, The Body, was a huge hit in 1986 and remains hugely popular today.

Phoenix played Chris Chambers, who along with his friends Gordie (Wil Wheaton), Teddy (Corey Feldman) and Vern (Jerry O’Connell) go in search of a dead body, learning a few facts about life along the way. The film also launched the career of a young Kiefer Sutherland.

River Phoenix As A Kid

Phoenix followed Stand by Me with the family drama The Mosquito Coast. He played Charlie, the son of Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren’s dysfunctional parents.

Ford’s Allie Fox is consumed by his rejection of American life and moves his family to a remote village in Central America, where the dream of a new start soon begins to crumble in the dangerous jungle surroundings.

In 1988, Phoenix starred in A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon, and Running on Empty. The latter earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, for his portrayal of Danny, the son of two underground terrorists on the run.

Next was Little Nikita, also 1988, with the legend Sidney Poitier. In the film, Phoenix’s Jeff Grant discovers that his parents are Soviet spies, wanted by the Russians and by the FBI. Grant teams up with Poitier’s Roy Parmenter, the only man he can trust in search for the truth.

Next came Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, with Phoenix playing a young Harrison Ford/Indiana Jones in the film’s sensational opening action scene.

Phoenix then teamed up with pal Keanu Reeves for Gus Van Sant’s 1991 cult classic, My Own Private Idaho, his last major film. 1992’s Sneakers and 1993’s Silent Tongue and The Thing Called Love were his last completed films.

Having begun shooting the thriller Dark Blood, Phoenix was due to start work on Interview with the Vampire shortly after – but sadly he died two weeks before filming began. Dark Blood was left only part-filmed.

Away from Hollywood, which portrayed Phoenix as a clean-cut nature-lover, Phoenix enjoyed a party life style. He dated actress Martha Plimpton, and then Samantha Mathis, another actor, who he met filming A Thing Called Love. Phoenix also played guitar in his own band, Aleka’s Attic, with Rainbow Phoenix, his sister, who was the band’s singer.

However, part of a group of Hollywood kids who always had to be at the hippest place and do the hippest things, Phoenix soon developed a drug habit.

31st October, 1993 – Halloween – was the night River Phoenix died. Phoenix went with friends, including his brother, Joaquin, to The Viper Room, the Hollywood night club owned by fellow actor Johnny Depp. There, Phoenix accidentally overdosed on a mixture of morphine and cocaine.

Phoenix was brought out of the club, according to Samantha Mathis, “high in a way that made me feel uncomfortable”. The paramedics came and Phoenix was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Hospital, but 50 minutes later he was dead.

There’s an old saying in Hollywood: Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse. Tragically, River succeeded.

With Phoenix’s passing, at the age of 23, audiences were suddenly denied years – likely decades – of great performances and great films from someone who was destined to be one of the biggest movie stars of the age, a Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio.

River Phoenix As A Baby

What Phoenix left behind, however, was a body of work that actors with careers twice, thrice, four times as long would be envious of. That’s River Phoenix’s true legacy: not what we’ve missed out on, but everything he left us in such a short span of time.

Keanu Reeves achieved superstardom as an actor in the ’80s and ’90s via iconic movie roles such as Ted in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and Neo in the science fiction classic The Matrix (1999), but, like many people irrespective of wealth and status, endured profound hardships along the way.

Unlike many people, however, Reeves’ personal tragedies have been compiled into a tearjerking Facebook video that was shared more than a half-million times within its first 72 hours of existence. The video, though quite brief, packs a lot of emotional wallop in a few words — most of which were copied verbatim from a viral Facebook post falsely attributed to Reeves in 2015:

With all due respect to Mr. Reeves (who, as far as we know, had nothing to do with the making of the video), we are now obliged to assess its veracity, claim by claim:

Phoenix

At age 3, his father left.

River

More-or-less true.Reeves was born in Beirut, Lebanon to a British mother and a Chinese-Hawaiian father in 1964. Biographical accounts vary as to precisely how old Keanu was when his ne’er-do-well father, Samuel Nowlin Reeves, abandoned the family. Some say Samuel left when Keanu was age two, some at age three, and the father himself is on record saying he moved out when Keanu was five, though he was still in his son’s life until he was about 13. “I spent my last vacation with him when I was 13 years old,” Keanu said in a 2002 interview. “On our last day we sat on the veranda and stared at the dark sky. He hardly said anything that evening. The next day he brought us to the airport. Then we didn’t hear anything from him for 10 years. No calls, no letters, nothing.”

He attended 4 different high schools and struggled with dyslexia, making education very difficult.

Mostly true. Reeves said in a 2008 interview with the Daily Mail that he attended four high schools in the space of five years but was “okay academically.” Vanity Fairreported in 1995 that both Keanu and his sister, Kim, are dyslexic. However, Reeves has also said that he didn’t do all that badly in school. He was asked about it by Tara Brady of the Irish Times:

Internet theorists would contend that sorrow stalks Reeves: that he lost his best friend River Phoenix when the pair were barely out of their teens, that as a child he was moved around from city to city, all the while struggling with dyslexia and academic underachievement.

That’s not entirely accurate, he says. “We didn’t move around that much,” says Reeves. “And I wasn’t the best student but I don’t remember having trouble fitting in. I kind of blended in.”

At age 23, his best friend River Phoenix died of a drug overdose.

Young River Phoenix As A Kid

True. Actor River Phoenix, whom Reeves had known for a few years and became close friends with when they acted together in My Own Private Idaho, died of combined drug intoxication outside a Los Angeles nightclub on 31 October 1993. He was 23.

In 1999, the love of his life, Jennifer Syme, was pregnant with their daughter. But the child was stillborn, and it cost them their relationship.

True.People magazine published this account of the stillbirth in April 2001:

Kid

In January 2000 Reeves and his then-girlfriend, Jennifer Syme, 29, buried their child, a girl named Ava, who had been stillborn at 8 months. The grief proved too much for their relationship, which ended several weeks later.

(NOTE: The image supposedly showing Jennifer Syme in the video is actually a photograph of someone else.)

River Phoenix As A Child

18 months later, Jennifer was killed in a car accident.

River Phoenix As A Kid

True. This account is from People magazine:

But they remained close friends, even brunching together as recently as April 1 [2001] at Crepes on Cole in San Francisco. Just one day later, a much shaken Reeves called the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office and asked, according to Lt. Mac Willie, “if Jen Syme was there.”

Sadly, she was. Shortly after 6 a.m. on April 2, Syme, who worked in the recording industry, lost control of her 1999 Jeep Cherokee on L.A.’s Cahuenga Boulevard, sideswiped three parked cars, rolled over several times and was thrown from the car. Authorities believe she died instantly, but they are awaiting toxicology tests to determine the final cause of death. (In her car police found prescribed antidepressants and two rolled-up dollar bills with “a white powdery substance” inside.) Whatever the result, Reeves, says a friend, “is finding it very, very difficult to cope with her death.”

His sister had leukemia. She was cured, and he donated 70 percent of his money from “The Matrix” to hospitals that treat leukemia.

Partly true. As best we can put together from press reports over the years, Kim Reeves, who is a few years younger than Keanu, was diagnosed with leukemia around 1991 and, after battling the disease for nearly a decade, was in remission as of 1999. A Woman’s Day (Australia) article published in April of that year said Keanu had “lovingly supported” his sister throughout her illness. Media reports as recent as 2015 still describe Kim Reeves as “battling leukemia” — as if there was a relapse — but it’s unclear to what extent that’s based on hard evidence. The claim that Keanu Reeves donated 70 percent of his Matrix earnings to hospitals that treat leukemia appears to have been fabricated, though we’ve found plenty of evidence to indicate he is a frequent and generous contributor to all sorts of charitable causes. In a Ladies Home Journal article published in 2009, he said he had started a private charitable foundation:

I have a private foundation that’s been running for five or six years, and it helps aid a couple of children’s hospitals and cancer research. I don’t like to attach my name to it, I just let the foundation do what it does.

He doesn’t own a big house like other stars, and he doesn’t wear fancy clothes.

Mixture. You wouldn’t describe Reeves’s $4 million two-bedroom house in the Hollywood Hills as “big,” but it’s a very nice home in a very nice neighborhood, with plenty of room for his cars and motorcycles, and with other celebrities living nearby. He doesn’t always wear fancy clothes, but sometimes he does.

He’s worth over $100 million, and still rides the subway.

Mixture. Most sources say Keanu Reeves’ net worth is about $350 million. He has been known to ride the subway on occasion, but on any given day is more likely to be seen driving his Porsche or one of his classic motorcycles. He’s been photographed on many occasions getting in and out of limos.

“It’s a cliché that money doesn’t buy you happiness. But it does buy you the freedom to live your life the way you want.” — Keanu Reeves in 2008.