LONDON • Hollywood legend Johnny Depp last Friday accused Britain's The Sun tabloid of turning him from "Cinderella into Quasimodo" by claiming he beat his ex-wife, model and actress Amber Heard.

The first week of Depp's star-studded libel trial against the paper's publisher and executive editor drew to a close with the 57-year-old denying hurling a champagne bottle and a phone at his former wife.

The Pirates Of The Caribbean (2003 to 2017) actor claims charges compiled by Heard, 34, over a tumultuous two-year marriage that ended in 2017 were a "hoax" designed to advance her career at his expense.

The High Court trial revolves around a 2018 headline in The Sun asking how author J.K. Rowling could be happy casting "wife-beater" Depp in a Fantastic Beasts (2016 to present) film.

Depp said the headline altered his Hollywood image and endangered his career. "I went from Cinderella into Quasimodo in 0.6 seconds and I was without a voice," he told the court. "That's where I was in my life at that point."

Cinderella is a mistreated stepdaughter who finds her prince and Quasimodo the disfigured protagonist of French writer Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1831).

Depp looked more confident and engaged on the fourth day of the three-week trial than he appeared at its start.

He listened alertly in an olive suit and verbally clashed with publisher News Group Newspapers' lawyer Sasha Wass in an attempt to refute her various charges.

Ms Wass has gone chronologically through each of Depp's 14 alleged assaults and other abuses.

She attempted last Friday to complete her depiction of the American actor as self-centred and out of touch with reality due to debilitating drug abuse.

Depp countered that it was Heard who was chronically looking for a fight. His defence last Thursday rested on a claim that he was so often high or strung out that he was in no physical condition to hurt Heard.

Depp spent a part of last Friday arguing with Ms Wass about whether the faeces found in the couple's bed were human.

He said it was not "physically possible" for one of their dogs to have left it there because it was simply too big.

"I was convinced that it was either Ms Heard herself or one of her cohort involved in leaving human faeces on the bed," Depp said. "I thought it was a strangely, oddly fitting end to the relationship."

He called the entire episode "a mystery".

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE