Curses, what big boots to fill

JOHNNY DEPP has never played it safe as an actor. One of his biggest gambles was turning his Capt. Jack Sparrow character into a seafaring Keith Richards in the 2003 blockbuster “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.” His outlandishly funny, quirky and sometimes even effeminate performance was a risk worth taking: It brought him the Screen Actors Guild Award and his first best actor Oscar nomination.

Now he’s returning as Sparrow in the much-anticipated “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” the first of two sequels.

Depp joins a long and often illustrious list of actors from the silent age to the present who have played buccaneers. Here’s a look at some of them:

The pirate hunk

* Douglas Fairbanks: During the 1920s, the fit, dashing and easygoing actor starred in a series of spectacular adventures including “The Mark of Zorro,” “Robin Hood” and “The Thief of Bagdad.” And he was in fine form in “The Black Pirate,” a fast-paced adventure classic from 1926. Shot in an early form of two-strip Technicolor, the lavish production finds Fairbanks as a Spanish duke who infiltrates a band of pirates to seek revenge for the murder of his father.

Though he performed most of his breathtaking stunts, a few were too dangerous. A stuntman was called in for the scene in which the character slides down a sail. Billie Dove and Donald Crisp also star.

* Errol Flynn: The handsome, charismatic, Tasmanian-born actor had appeared in bit roles in a few films for Warner Bros. when he was given the lead in the studio’s lavish 1935 adaptation of Rafael Sabatini’s highflying pirate tale “Captain Blood.”

The popular British actor Robert Donat originally had been cast in the part of an Irish doctor who becomes a notorious pirate after he is unjustly arrested, but he didn’t show up when production was set to begin. Actor Brian Aherne was offered the part and turned it down.

Flynn, then just 25, exudes the charm, sex appeal and derring-do of a screen veteran in this exhilarating action-adventure directed by Michael Curtiz.

“Captain Blood” also marked the beginning of Flynn’s popular screen pairing with Olivia de Havilland, who was all of 19 when she appeared as the feisty Arabella Bishop. Basil Rathbone is at his evil best as the dastardly pirate, Levasseur. Blood’s sword dual with the villain is one of the film’s highlights.

Nearly three decades later, Flynn’s son Sean starred in the ill-conceived “Son of Captain Blood.”

Five years after “Captain Blood,” Flynn returned to his seafaring ways in the action-packed pirate epic “The Sea Hawk,” which also was directed by Curtiz. Flynn plays Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe, a gallant buccaneer who leads his band of ruffians across the Atlantic as they steal from ships to replenish the treasury of Queen Elizabeth I (a wonderful Flora Robson).

Thorpe’s archenemy is the vile Don Jose Alvarez de Cordoba, played by the glorious British character actor Claude Rains. The only downside is the colorless Brenda Marshall as Thorpe’s love interest.

By the time Flynn made 1952’s “Against All Flags,” his years of substance abuse had gotten the better of him. He could barely swash, let alone buckle. But Maureen O’Hara -- by now a veteran of such seafaring movies as “The Black Swan” and “The Spanish Main” -- seems to be enjoying herself as a lady pirate.

* Tyrone Power: Power was the reigning leading man at 20th Century Fox. Darkly handsome, he was athletic and charming, and the part of British pirate James Waring in 1942’s Technicolor spectacular “The Black Swan” was tailored to his talents. The film gives him plenty of opportunities to show off both his prowess with the sword and his buffed bare chest.

* Burt Lancaster: The well-chiseled former circus acrobat flashes his pecs and his mega-watt smile and demonstrates his energetic gymnastic skills in the colorful 1952 adventure “The Crimson Pirate.” Lancaster plays Capt. Vallo, a pirate who becomes involved in a Caribbean revolution, circa the late 1700s.

The film also stars Nick Cravat as Lancaster’s mute sidekick. The two had been childhood friends who became an acrobatic team.

The pirate bully

* Robert Newton: The British actor loved to chew the scenery and his larger-than-life antics made him a perfect pirate bully in a series of films in the 1950s.

In Walt Disney’s first live-action film, 1950’s “Treasure Island,” Newton brings Robert Louis Stevenson’s charismatic peg-legged buccaneer Long John Silver to vivid life. Bobby Driscoll plays young Jim Hawkins, who unfortunately turns Silver into a surrogate father.

Newton strapped on the wooden leg again for the disappointing 1954 adventure “Long John Silver,” which was the first Cinemascope production shot in Australia.

This time around, Silver arrives on a British Caribbean island and learns that a rival pirate (Lloyd Berrell) has commandeered a ship on which he’s holding the governor’s daughter and Jim Hawkins as prisoners.

After the film was completed, the producer filmed 26 half-hour episodes of “The Adventures of Long John Silver,” starring Newton, which aired on CBS in 1955.

Newton played the notorious “Blackbeard, the Pirate” in a 1952 adventure that also starred Torin Thatcher as rival pirate Sir Henry Morgan and Linda Darnell as the kidnapped beauty who comes between the two brigands.

* Charles Laughton: The rotund, Oscar-winning British actor hammed it up as the nefarious Capt. Kidd in the routine 1945 adventure “Captain Kidd,” in which the pirate tries to double-cross the King of England (Henry Daniell). Randolph Scott, John Carradine and Barbara Britton also star.

Seven years later, Laughton resurrected the role for laughs in “Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd.” In this outing, two waiters (Abbott and Costello), find themselves embroiled with pirates when they accidentally discover a treasure map.

Supposedly, Laughton took the film because he wanted to learn the art of the double take from the comedy team.

Shiver me

timbers

* Walter Matthau: The sad-sacked Oscar-winning actor was one of America’s comic acting treasures. But he was sorely miscast in Roman Polanski’s 1986 shipwreck of an adventure, “Pirates.” Matthau plays Capt. Red, an old brigand with a peg leg who is cast adrift and picked up by a Spanish galleon. The film capsized at the box office and with critics.

* Geena Davis: The Oscar-winning actress stars as Morgan Adams, a “notorious lady pirate” with a mean right hook, in the big-budget 1995 epic “Cutthroat Island,” which sank like a stone with critics and audiences.

Though Davis seems to be enjoying herself in this overstuffed turkey directed by then-husband Renny Harlin, audiences wanted her to walk the plank.

Lest we

forget

Wallace Beery in 1934’s “Treasure Island”; Paul Henreid in 1945’s “The Spanish Main”; Fredric March in 1938’s “The Buccaneer” and Yul Brynner in the 1958 remake of the same name; Anthony Quinn in 1965’s “A High Wind in Jamaica”; Kevin Kline in 1983’s “The Pirates of Penzance”; Gene Kelly in 1948’s “The Pirate”; Sessue Hayakawa in 1960’s “Swiss Family Robinson”; Jean Peters in 1951’s “Anne of the Indies”; Dustin Hoffman in 1991’s “Hook”; and Jason Isaacs in 2003’s “Peter Pan.”