Who is Mickey Rourke

Raised in the tough inner city, Rourke took up self-defense training at the Boys Club of Miami. It was there he learned boxing skills, and decided on an amateur career. At the age of 12, Rourke won his first boxing match as a 118-pound bantamweight. Some of his early matches were fought as Andre Rourke. He continued his boxing training at the famed 5th Street Gym on Miami Beach, Florida; joining the Police Athletic League boxing program. In 1969, Rourke, now weighing 140lbs., sparred with former World Welterweight Champion Luis Rodriguez. Rodriguez was the number one rated middleweight boxer in the world, and was training for his match with world champion Nino Benvenuti. Rourke claims to have received a concussion in this sparring match. In 1971, at the Florida Golden Gloves, he received another concussion from a boxing match. He was told by doctors to take a year off and rest, but Rourke decided to retire from the ring. From 1968 to 1972, Mickey Rourke compiled an amateur boxing record of 20-6, with 17 knockouts. He was disqualified 4 times, and lost 2 decisions. At one point, he reportedly scored 12 consecutive first round knockouts. As an amateur, Rourke had been friendly with pro-boxer Tommy Torino. When Rourke decided to return to boxing as a professional, Torino promoted some of Rourke's fights. Rourke was trained by former pro-boxer Freddie Roach at Miami Beach's 5th Street Gym and the Outlaw Boxing Club Gym in Los Angeles. Rourke made $250 for his pro debut, but by the end of his 2nd year of boxing, he earned a million dollars. Rourke appeared on the cover of World Boxing Magazine in June 1994. He sparred with world champions James Toney, John David Jackson, and Tommy Morrison. Rourke wanted to have 16 professional fights and then fight for a world title. However, he retired after 7 bouts and never got his desired title fight. His boxing career resulted in severe facial injuries which required a number of operations to repair his damaged face.
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Catching the acting bug, he journeyed to NYC and studied with Sandra Seacat, appearing without distinction in some off-off-Broadway plays and leaving others during rehearsals over disagreements with directors. His luck changed when he landed in Los Angeles and began getting small film roles ("1941" 1979, "Heaven's Gate" 1980) and prominent parts in three 1980 TV-movies: a murderer in "City in Fear" (ABC); a paraplegic who begs his brother to kill him in "Act of Love" (NBC) and the husband accused of assaulting his wife in "Rape and Marriage: The Rideout Case" (CBS). Acclaimed work in two features by emerging young directors, as a professional arsonist in Lawrence Kasdan's "Body Heat" (1981) and a debt-ridden hairdresser/lothario in Barry Levinson's "Diner" (1982), led to Rourke's first leading roles in features.

Rourke's Motorcycle Boy in Francis Ford Coppola's screen version of S.E. Hinton's "Rumble Fish" (1983), was sort of a James Dean gone to seed, an addled eccentric whose fragility is clearly visible. His first starring role in "The Pope of Greenwich Village" (1984) also cast him in this light as the young hood whose underlying sensitivity prevents him from breaking away from his perpetual screw-up of a cousin (Eric Roberts). Rourke emerged as a rough-edged anti-hero in movies like Michael Cimino's "Year of the Dragon" (1995), metamorphosing from sympathetic "existentialist to violent nihilist"; Adrian Lyne's "9 1/2 Weeks" (1986), playing a New York stockbroker involved in a sadomasochistic affair with a downtown art gallery manager (Kim Basinger); and "Barfly" (1987), delivering his most engaging performance since "Diner" as a drunken, brawling, sometime writer, his long, dangling, dark, unwashed hair and unglamorous stubble making him almost unrecognizable at the outset. Relaxing into the Charles Bukowski-inspired character, he keeps the film buoyantly alive throughout, elevating what could have been a depressing tale of losers to a low-life fairy tale, leavened by considerable, unforced comedy.

Proving that fact can be stranger than fiction, Rourke became the darling of Europe, particularly France, where he was practically hailed as the second-coming of Jerry Lewis. Though many admired his work in "Rumble Fish", the French in large part discovered him in "Year of the Dragon" (a film disdained by American critics, picketed by Asian-American groups and avoided by moviegoers), touting it as the latest masterpiece by the director of "Heaven's Gate". Dismissed as "yuppie-soft-porn" in the USA, "9 1/2 Weeks" played two years on the Champs-Elysees and showed continuously at different theaters in Paris thereafter. "Angel Heart" (1987), a murky, erotic thriller best described as occult film noir, starring Rourke as a two-bit private detective, received a similarly enthusiastic response. Even Cimino's remake of "Desperate Hours" (1990, with Rourke in the Bogart role), which failed to engage US critics and audiences and disappeared quickly into video oblivion, played well in France. It would seem to be some monstrous practical joke, but the French embraced the rumpled, slightly dirty, sordid quality of his rebel persona.

In the USA, however, Rourke's career went into decline as his self-destructive tendencies came to the fore. Though some directors (i.e., Cimino and Lyne) and actors (e.g., Faye Dunaway) sang his praises, there were others like Alan Parker (director of "Angel Heart") who said, "Working with Mickey is a nightmare. He is very dangerous on the set because you never know what he is going to do." The pugnacious Rourke, who did his share of fighting in "Barfly", made a stab at auteurship, authoring "Homeboy" (1988), but the result, with him as an aging, alcoholic boxer, didn't go far on either side of the Atlantic. He courted controversy by saying he donated part of his salary from 1989's "Francesco" (in which he portrayed St. Francis of Assisi) to the IRA, acquired a reputation as a loudmouth and a punk for bragging to reporters about his friendships within alleged mobsters within the Gotti organization and did the most damage to his reputation by listlessly walking through a series of roles as if self-parody was enough to keep the well of talent from drying up. With his acting career on the ropes, he returned to boxing, saying later "I had to go back to boxing because I was self-destructing. I had no respect for myself being an actor. So I went back to a profession which really humbled me."

Realizing his career would be over unless he could make the industry take him seriously again, Rourke retired from boxing to hit the comeback trail and finally lifted himself from the terrain of moribund crime dramas like "Bullet" and "Fall Time" (both 1995) to play the sleazy villain of "Double Team" (1997), alongside Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman. He also upped his bankability markedly that year with his most effective screen appearance in ages, again oozing slime as the "ethically-challenged" lawyer Bruiser Stone of "John Grisham's 'The Rainmaker'" under the guidance of Francis Ford Coppola. His cameo as a bookie in Vincent Gallo's directorial debut, "Buffalo 66" (1998), didn't hurt either. Suddenly, Rourke's plate was full with marginal projects like the direct-to-video releases "Thursday" and "Point Blank" and the more prestigious "The Thin Red Line" (all 1998). He continued to develop his own script about a hitman undergoing a personal (and professional) crisis. Hollywood has a long tradition of forgiveness, but only time will tell if Rourke can truly reenter mainstream films and fulfill the promise of his talent.

Rourke made had a unforgettable cameo in the small, edgy character-driven feature "Animal House" (2000), appearing as a transvestite drag performer. The following year, he was cast in Sean Penn's third directorial project "The Pledge" (2001). In 2003, Rourke played a drug "mixer" and "dealer" in the dark comedy "Spun," a feature directed by Jonas Akerlund, and cameoed in director Bob Dylan's "Masked and Anonymous" before director Robert Rodriguez cast him in a career-reviving role as Billy, an otherwise sinister enforcer whose menace is somewhat undermined because he carries a little dog at all times, in "Once Upon a Time in Mexico," a continuation of the "El Mariachi" adventures.

Rourke re-teamed with Rodriguez when the director tapped him to play the iconic Marv, one of the antiheroes from writer-artist Frank Miller's crime noir comic book series "Sin City," which Rodriguez and Miller turned into a visually arresting 2005 film. With his face covered in prosthetics to more perfectly provide an approximation of Marv's distinctively exaggerated rough-hewn features for "The Hard Goodbye" storyline, Rourke delivered a tour de force performance, alternately chilling and amusing, that marked him as an actor who was still to be reckoned with.

For his next role, he initially refused the role of bounty hunter Ed Moesby in "Domino" (2005), director Tony Scott's hyperkinetic pseudo-biopic of model-turned-tracker Domino Harvey (Keria Knightley), finding the role too conventional and uninteresting. But when Scott allowed Rourke to help shape the character into something more quirky and original, he attacked the role with his characteristic gusto. It had been a long, slow climb back from the bottom, but Rourke had returned with spate of fresh, exciting performances that caused Hollywood to take notice, and he appeared determined not to blow his second chance at a career in front of the cameras.
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