Legal issues helped Johnny Depp expedite his exit from mainstream Hollywood, but the actor’s string of recent high-profile court battles were hardly his first brushes with the law.

It was the very public airing of his dirty laundry opposite ex-wife Amber Heard that captured the imagination in an almost ghoulish fashion, given the way it became a point of obsession and contention, which culminated in Depp losing several high-paying gigs and fleeing to the continent.

Up until a point, at least, after he showed his hypocritical side by suggesting that his relationship with the American film industry had been the subject of a mutual termination, only to end up accepting the very first major studio-backed offer that came his way following his incessantly publicised fall from grace.

As mentioned, though, he wasn’t a novice regarding that sort of thing. Dating back to the late 1980s, Depp has been involved in several incidents of a similar nature. He was arrested for assaulting a security guard, arrested again for fighting with the paparazzi, was sued after allegations his security team had roughed up a professor, falsified documents to bring a dog into Australia, and was hit with a lawsuit for physically and verbally assaulting a crew member, among others.

Another arrest that sent the tabloids into a frenzy had him hoovering up column inches after trashing a hotel room in New York City in 1994, which saw Depp handcuffed and led out of the building to the delight of the gathered throng eager to snap a picture of the star being escorted away by law enforcement.

The charges were dropped when he paid the damages, which totalled almost $10,000, and while his comments hit differently in a modern context, friend and Cry-Baby collaborator John Waters believed at the time that being arrested and plastered all over newspapers and magazines was only going to be good for Depp in the long run.

“The hotel thing hasn’t hurt his career,” the filmmaker told Esquire in April 1995, more than six months after the incident. “He looked good under arrest. I loved the handcuffs; they always work. Criminal movie star is a really good look for Johnny. The success of a hotel room trashing should be calculated by the amount of damage divided by the amount of column inches.”

Of course, a world-renowned provocateur like the ‘Pope of Trash’ is always going to find the positives in one of his friends being paraded in front of the world with their hands cuffed behind their back, but Waters’ enthusiastic endorsement of Depp as a constant side in the thorn of the authorities hasn’t aged particularly well knowing how future courtroom appearances would hammer at least a couple of nails into his career coffin.