A wild love

Johnny Depp & Kate Moss

It took an earthquake in California for Johnny and Kate to meet in the nineties. Fortunately, the actor's life was not endangered by the quake, but it did make his house uninhabitable. The repairs would take several months, so he found a place to stay in New York. One of the places he visited there was the then newly opened and trendy Café Tabac on East 9th Street. This is where Johnny Depp and Kate Moss met for the first time in 1994.

"I knew from the first moment that we would end up together," Kate Moss said later. "I had never experienced anything like it before."

Kate was twenty years old at the time and had experienced a lot herself up to that point. She had already been signed by an agency at the age of fourteen. Her breakthrough came the previous year when British Vogue published an eight-page photo spread of Corinne Day. When Johnny saw her for the first time, lightning struck him just as hard as it did her. There was a kind of kindred spirit between the two.

Both Depp and Moss were already stars in their industry, even though they had broken the rules several times. Both came from unspectacular, rather simple backgrounds and at the time they were both confused and frightened by the attention they received from the world [...]. Johnny inspired Kate with his passion for literature. She has been a big fan of Francis Scott Fitzgeral since her time with the actor.

They had a lot of fun going to parties together. In Kate - who was nicknamed "The Tank" in the scene because she could handle so much - Johnny had found an equal partner. What's more, neither of them could keep their hands off cigarettes.

In February 1994, the couple made their relationship public at the premiere of Johnny Depp's short film Banter. In March, they went on vacation together on a yacht off the Caribbean island of St. Barth. When Johnny was on a ski vacation with Kate in Aspen, he met Hunter S. Thompson in the Woody Creek Tavern.

The relationship lasted until the late nineties. They parted on good terms. On May 17, 1998, Johnny declared in the New York Daily News:

"Kate is someone who means a lot to me. We were together for four years, and she's a great, lovely, sweet, pure woman; a really good guy, and I like her a lot. Deep down, I still feel a great love for her. But when you're separated over long distances as often as we are, it's hard to maintain a relationship. We still see each other, go out and talk on the phone. We're very close, but I'm not in a relationship at the moment."

In 2013, he appeared together with Kate Moss in the video for "Queenie Eye", but no new entanglements resulted from the shoot.

Quoted from: Johnny Depp - The man behind the masks by Thomas Fuchs, 2016

(Hanna - Jan. 2025)

They also share their sense of humor:

When a toilet in the Viper Room was once blocked (a guest had thrown the hard core of a toilet roll into it), the owners dismantled the bowl and put it in the guest room. Kate then asked Johnny: 

"Will you give me a hundred dollars if I reach into the bowl and get the thing out?"
Johnny replied:

"Yes, because I can get $400 for a picture of you with your hand in a toilet from the National Enquirer."

Banner photo: Pool Benainous/Duclos/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images