born 23 August 1970

Brad Mehldau, Jacksonville, Florida, musician

Daniel Gonzalez, El Paso, Texas, actor

Drew MacIver, Penang, Malaysia, actor

Gina Sigillito, Saint Louis, Missouri, girl at concert

Janne Sevtsenko, birthplace unspecified, Estonian actress

Jay Mohr, Verona, New Jersey, actor/comedian

Jeffrey Miller, Vernon, Connecticut, actor

Kai Holzapfel, Berlin, East Germany, actor

Krishna Kumar “Kay Kay” Menon, Thrissur, India, musician

Lester G. Reynolds, Kingsport, Tennessee, extra

Lisa Gal, birthplace unspecified, American cheerleader

Luis DeMatos, birthplace unspecified, Mozambique-born Portuguese magician

Marsha Wattanapanich, birthplace unspecified, German/Thai actress/singer

Natalya Petrova, birthplace unspecified, Russian actress

Nicholas Guilak, Houston, Texas, actor

Pontus Hjortén, birthplace unspecified, Swedish actor

River Phoenix (died 31 October 1993), Madras, Oregon, actor/musician/heartthrob/cautionary tale

Sung-jae Lee, Seoul, South Korea, actor

Tim Garrick, Cleveland, Ohio, writer

There are a couple of things I think we can all agree on about River Phoenix.

One, it’s a shame he died so young. Two, chicks dug him, and straight guys tolerated him just fine too. Gay guys, well, I mean, obviously, I guess, right? So he was an actor it was damn near impossible not to like. And yet there was something about the style of his Hollywood partyboy demise, coupled with Kurt Cobain’s rendezvous with a shotgun early the following spring, that has tempered River Phoenix’s posthumous adulation. Though he’s well though of, whenever he is thought of, he just isn’t thought of quite as much as you might have expected he would be, a decade and a half into his afterlife.

Opinions diverge from there. I’ve been quizzing friends about what kind of career Today’s Winner might have had, had an antidote for his lethal speedball been available. It’s very much in the eye of the beholder. While it’s universally acknowledged that the careers of a couple of actors would have taken a very different turn had he lived, if you look at that group, it only underscores how tricky it is to pin down what lay in store for an older River Phoenix.

First, you have the actual beneficiaries. Of the three roles the deceased was known to have been in line for, two ended up being snapped up by Leonardo DiCaprio, and one by Christian Slater. But each of those guys started out as one kind of thing, and each turned into quite another. That's the joy of watching young actors burn brightly in their twenties; you never know what species of creature any one of them might emerge as twenty years along. Compare, from a slightly earlier vintage, these guys.

This kid showed enough range in the eighties and nineties that I'm certain he could have turned into just about any kind of thing. Here are just a few of the parts I’d have been interested to see our honoree cast in.

Ichabod Crane

Smoochy The Rhino

Norman Bates

Craig Schwartz

Amsterdam Vallon

Fred Madison

Jennings

Jeffrey Goines

Russell Hammond

Not necessarily saying that the people who played these parts didn’t do an admirable job. Just recalling that every part that ever gets cast is at the expense of everyone else who might have played it.

Directors I would have liked him to work with, in roles unknown: Antonioni, Cronenberg, Harron, Jarmusch, Schrader, Spielberg, Waters

Impossible projects he would have been ideal for:

>A fiction film about the destitute gypsy existence of the Phoenix family in the Seventies, in which the adult Phoenix siblings would wander about the margins of the frame, occasionally remarking on the action

>Roger Avary’s unproduced screenplay about the young Salvador Dalí

>A biopic about Philip K. Dick’s five marriages, which would be shot on and off over the course of 25 or so actual years

There's a lot more to say on this subject, but essays and blog posts are not the same thing. So, shortly and sweetly, happy birthday kid. Glad you were born, sorry you died.