Mickey Rourke

Mickey Rourke

Sponsored Links:

Birth name: Philip Andre Rourke Jr. 
Date of birth: 16 September 1956
Place of birth: Schenectady, New York, USA
Nickname: Sir Eddie Cook, Mickey Rourke
Height: 5′ 11″ (1.80 m)
Spouse: Carre Otis (26 June 1992 – December 1998) (divorced), Debra Feuer (1981 – 1989) (divorced)

Famous Quote: “I didn’t have a childhood, really, because I worked my whole life and… other reasons. So when I had some success, I went ballistic. That was my childhood, and the party kept going on. I didn’t get off my motorcycle for 10 years. I always knew I’d accomplish something very special – like robbing a bank perhaps.”

Contact Address and Autograph: Addresses and fan mail information

Mickey Rourke
ICM Los Angeles
10250 Constellation Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90067, USA 

Biography:  Philip Andre “Mickey” Rourke, Jr. (born September 16, 1952 in Schenectady, New York) is an American actor who has primarily appeared in drama, action, and thriller films. Trained as a boxer in his early years, Rourke had a short stint as a pro fighter in the 1990s. Although his acting career has been uneven, he has carved out a niche over the last decades in gritty, marginalized anti-hero roles.

Charismatic, outspoken tough guy Mickey Rourke is the perfect example of art imitating life and vice versa. Raised in the primarily black Liberty City section of Miami, where “I had to be fast and fight,” he showed early promise for both baseball and boxing but, lacking discipline, quit both in favor of “hanging out” and getting in trouble. 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 was born in Schenectady, New York, the son of Ann and Philip Andre Rourke, Sr., who was an amateur body builder. His family was Catholic and of Irish and French descent. After his parents divorced, he moved with his mother to Florida, where he attended Miami Beach Senior High School. Rourke played second-string first baseman on the school’s baseball team under coach Skip Bertman. His acting career during his high school days is something of a mystery. There are some reports that Rourke took drama classes with the legendary “Teacher To The Stars”, Jay W. Jensen, even appearing in at least one stage-play. However, the “P. Rourke” listed in that play’s credits could have been his sister, Patricia Rourke, who also attended Miami Beach Senior High School.

Rourke’s teenage years were more aimed toward sports than acting. 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 in 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 in a boxing match. After being told by doctors to take a year off and rest, Rourke temporarily retired from the ring. From 1968 to 1971, he compiled an amateur 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.

Rourke’s film debut was a small role in Steven Spielberg’s film 1941. Though it was not his first role, his portrayal of an arsonist in Body Heat garnered significant attention despite his modest time onscreen. During the early 1980s, Rourke starred in the cult classic Diner, which also starred Paul Reiser, Daniel Stern, Steve Guttenberg, Tim Daly and Kevin Bacon. Soon after, Rourke starred in Francis Ford Coppola’s follow-up to The Outsiders in the coming-of-age tale, Rumble Fish. Playing the enigmatic older brother of Matt Dillon’s character, he was praised as a standout in a film that also featured such talents as Dennis Hopper, Vincent Spano, Diane Lane, Nicolas Cage, Chris Penn, Larry Fishburne and Tom Waits.

Rourke’s performance in the film The Pope of Greenwich Village alongside Daryl Hannah and Eric Roberts caught the attention of critics. While the film was a box office flop during its initial release, it has become somewhat of a minor cult hit. Actor Johnny Depp calls it “perfect cinema” and HBO’s Entourage has praised it. Rourke has said the film is his favorite movie, and both Hannah and Roberts have cited it as a highlight of their careers.

In the mid-1980s, Rourke earned himself additional leading roles. His role alongside Kim Basinger in the controversial yet panned, sexually-themed box-office hit 9½ Weeks helped him gain “sex symbol” status. He received critical praise for his work in Barfly as the alcoholic writer Henry Chinaski, and in the Oliver Stone-penned Year of the Dragon. In 1987, Rourke appeared in the movie Angel Heart. The film was directed by Alan Parker and nominated for several awards. It was seen as controversial by some due to a sex scene involving Cosby Show cast member Lisa Bonet, who won an award for her part in the film. Although some of Rourke’s work was viewed as controversial in the US, he was well-received by European, and especially French, audiences who loved the “rumpled, slightly dirty, sordid…rebel persona” that he projected in Year of the Dragon, 9 1/2 Weeks, Angel Heart, and Desperate Hours.

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 late 1980s, Rourke performed with musician David Bowie on the Never Let Me Down album. Around this same time, he also wrote his first screenplay, Homeboy, a boxing tale in which he starred. In 1991 Rourke starred in the box office bomb Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man as Harley Davidson, a biker whose best friend, Marlboro, is played by Miami Vice star Don Johnson. Rourke’s acting career eventually became overshadowed by his personal life and seemingly eccentric career decisions. Directors such as Alan Parker found it difficult to work with Rourke. Parker stated that “working with Mickey is a nightmare. He is very dangerous on the set because you never know what he is going to do”. He is alleged to have turned down a number of high-profile acting roles. While Rourke turned down major film roles, he did perform in the soft-core adult-themed film Wild Orchid, which may have had an impact on his reputation as an actor.

In 1991, Rourke decided that he “…had to go back to boxing,” because he felt that he “…was self-destructing…and had no respect for myself being an actor.” When Rourke became a professional boxer, he won all of his fights against minor opponents (and had one fight come to a draw). However, he never achieved national prominence, and he received a number of injuries, including a broken nose, toe, ribs, a split tongue, and a compressed cheekbone. His trainer during his boxing career was Hells Angels member Chuck Zito.

Boxing promoters stated that Rourke was too old to do well against top-level fighters. Indeed, Rourke himself admits that entering the ring was a sort of personal test: “I…just wanted to give it a shot, test myself that way physically, while I still had time (interview in The Gate with Christopher Heard). In 1995, Rourke retired from boxing and returned to acting.

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.

In the early 1990s, Quentin Tarantino offered Rourke the part of Butch Coolidge in Pulp Fiction. Rourke declined, and the role eventually was offered to Matt Dillon and Sylvester Stallone, before Bruce Willis invested in the film and was given the part. After his retirement from boxing, Rourke did accept supporting roles in several 1990s films, including John Grisham’s The Rainmaker, Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo ’66, Steve Buscemi’s Animal Factory and Sylvester Stallone’s remake of Get Carter. During this time Rourke also starred in the underatted classic Bullet

While Rourke was also selected for a significant role in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, Rourke’s part ended up on the editing room floor. Rourke also played a small part in the film Thursday, in which he plays a crooked cop. He also had a lead role in 1997′s Double Team, which co-starred martial arts actor Jean-Claude Van Damme. It was Rourke’s first over-top action film role, in which he played the lead villain. On the same year, he filmed Another 9 1/2 Weeks, a sequel to 9 1/2 Weeks, which only received limited distribution.

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.

In 2000, Rourke took the role of The Cook in Jonas Åkerlund’s Spun, teaming up with Eric Roberts. In 2001, he appeared as the villain in Enrique Iglesias’s music video for Hero which also featured Jennifer Love Hewitt. His first collaborations with directors Robert Rodriguez and Tony Scott in Once Upon a Time in Mexico and Man on Fire, were for smaller roles. Nonetheless, these directors subsequently decided to cast Rourke in lead roles in their next films.

In 2005, Rourke made his comeback in mainstream Hollywood circles with a lead role (Marv) in Robert Rodriguez’s adaptation of Frank Miller’s Sin City. Rourke received awards from the Chicago Film Critics Association, the IFTA and the Online Film Critics Society, as well as “Man of the Year” from Total Film magazine that year. Rourke followed Sin City with a supporting role in Tony Scott’s Domino alongside Keira Knightley, in which he played a bounty hunter.

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.

Rourke played the role of The Blackbird in an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Killshot, the role of “Darrius Sayle” in an adaptation of the Alex Rider novel Stormbreaker. He will also appear alongside Ray Liotta in John McNaughton’s The Night Job, as well as reprising the role of “Marv” in the Dame to Kill For segment of Sin City 2.

In addition, in 2003, Rourke provided the voice for “Jericho” in the third installment of the Driver video game series. Rourke also recently appeared in a 40-page story by photographer Bryan Adams for Berlin’s Zoo Magazine. In an article about Rourke’s return to steady acting roles, entitled Mickey Rourke Rising (from The Gate), Christopher Heard stated that actors/musicians Tupac Shakur, Johnny Depp, Sean Penn and Brad Pitt have “…animated praise for Rourke and his work.”

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. 

Despite having withdrawn from acting at various points, and having made movies that he now sees as a creative “sell-out” (the action film Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man), Rourke has stated that “…all that I have been through…[has] made me a better, more interesting actor.” Rourke’s renewed interest in pursuing acting can be seen in his statement that “…my best work is still ahead of me” (article in The Gate).

In November 2006, during an interview, he called Tom Cruise an expletive for his attacks on Brooke Shields and Psychiatry. In February 2007 he was in South Beach, Florida, protesting against a puppy store he claims sells dogs with parvo. He wanted the store to shut down, claiming a puppy he bought for his friend at the store died. He was supported with other activists.

Mickey signed up to act in the movie version of the The Informers in the role of Peter, an amoral former studio security guard who plots to kidnap a small child. Mickey has also signed on to The Wrestler an upcoming movie about a washed up wrestler. The part was originally Nicholas Cage’s but he dropped the role for unknown reasons. Mickey has begun undergoing actual pro-wrestling training under WWE Hall of Famer Afa The Wild Samoan.

Rourke’s political views came under fire when he claimed to have donated part of his salary from the 1989 film, Francesco, to the Provisional Irish Republican Army. He later backed away from that statement, although he has an IRA symbol tattooed on his left forearm. In 2006, Rourke declared his support for the Republican US President George W. Bush. Rourke is a devout Roman Catholic.

During his career, Rourke worked with directors including Steven Spielberg, Lawrence Kasdan, Francis Ford Coppola, Barry Levinson, Stuart Rosenberg, Nicolas Roeg, Michael Cimino, Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, Mike Hodges, Barbet Schroeder, Walter Hill, Tsui Hark, Terrence Malick, Jonas Åkerlund, Wong Kar Wai, Tony Scott, Robert Rodriguez and John Madden, as well as actors-turned-directors Sean Penn, Vincent Gallo and Steve Buscemi.