The briefly sane actor who made waves in films like Gladiator and To Die For has since become famous for getting lost in the shuffle — as publicly as possible. Not content to come up with his own shtick, he stole pretty much every idea Andy Kaufman ever had and pretended to go seriously off the edge for more than a year. And just to make sure everyone noticed, he made a film about this dropping under the radar and nearly refused to be saved by Werner Herzog in a car accident while pretending to seriously pursue a rap career. In the typical mistake of a super-diva, Phoenix overestimated his own fame, and the whole ideal was met with little more than some confused yawns.
