Phoenix’s hardscrabble youth

Joaquin Phoenix is now one of the world’s highest-paid actors, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.), but he can still remember what it was like to have almost nothing. He was born in Puerto Rico to parents who were members of the apocalyptic, free-love Children of God cult. The family fled the cult when Phoenix was 3 years old and ended up in Los Angeles. His father was often unemployed, and Joaquin and his siblings used to busk to supplement their mother’s wages from her job as a secretary. “Things were financially challenging,” Phoenix says, “but my dad always managed.” For one birthday, he was given a bicycle— or rather, the remains of four bikes cobbled together: “A tire from here, a saddle from there. But to me it was amazing.” On a cross-country road trip the family ran so short of money that they could no longer afford to feed their dog. His father persuaded a stranger in a supermarket to take the animal off their hands. “I don’t know how he managed to do it,” says Phoenix, 44. “But I remember sitting in our station wagon and seeing this guy come out with our dog and a big bag of dog food. We were so happy that the dog was going to eat.”