Robert Downey Sr.

Robert John Downey Sr. was born Robert Elias Jr. on June 24, 1936, and spent the 1960s making what one scholar called "strictly take-no-prisoners affairs" — shoestring countercultural films that shoved against every polite boundary. In 1969 he released Putney Swope, a caustic takedown of the New York advertising world that became his signature. Three years later came Greaser's Palace, a surrealist Western that confirmed his taste for the absurd. The minimal budgets and outrageous satire defined an era's fringe, and the filmmaker raised a son who would carry some of that defiance into a very di…