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This is an amazing bio from Cintra Wilson's blog. It's long, but great:
MICKEY ROURKE - EXISTENTIAL FONZIE PUNCHES THE MIRROR
Phillip Andre Rourke, Jr. was born on September 16 in 1950, but some reports claim it was 1956. He was a tough kid from Schenectady: a boxer who studied acting at the Lee Strasberg school, then went back to boxing, and is presently trying to get back into acting. At his peak, women loved him because he was better than anybody at smirking in a way that looked like his hard-on gave him terrible emotional pain. Rourke's career is notable for the heady price he paid for his eccentricities, the most expensive of which being that his credibility as an actor was labeled with a scarlet question mark. But this, by and large, is a bad rap.
Good dramatic actors, who need to access a vast color-wheel of emotion, are often intolerably volatile, hypersensitive nut-jobs in real life. To inhabit characters of dubious artistic value, it is also helpful if they aren't terribly smart. Rourke appears to have both of these drawbacks going for him; it is an equation that spells temporary magic onscreen and usually results in terrible suffering offscreen . The very same explosive emotionality which attracts Hollywood executives at the beginning of an actor's career are the seeds of the actor's own demise when he is inevitably labeled "difficult" by the unsympathetic corporate drones who run the movie business. Personal histrionics, a "difficult" reputation and a bad habit of ridiculously sleazy script choices have overwhelmed Rourke's public image to the point that nobody thinks of him as a serious actor with a wide dramatic range. Although many of his 43 movies are disposable, a look at the defining films of his career with an objective X-Ray eye reveals that his acting is a lot better than he got credit for.
Rourke broke through in 1981, Brad-Pitt-In-Thelma-And-Louise-esquely, as an arsonist in the sweaty erotic thriller Body Heat. His tough-guy posturing and glowering, pretty-boy menace made the Hollywood Beast think he might come in handy for a while.
Rourke hit his early Rourkish stride in 1982's Diner as "Boogie," the inveterate gambler-cum-playboy hairdresser. He doesn't fit in with the overall flavor of the film; all of the other actors are on a chatty 78 RPM and Rourke is on a self-consciously heavy 33. He seems to need to be too cool for the movie. As a result, he looks isolated, coming off like the one actor that wasn't dining with the other actors and demanded to eat in his own trailer. But he does have a certain gravity. His pouty lower lip is used to great effect. There is an almost androgynous appeal to him here; he is wearing more eyeliner than Ellen Barkin. Female audiences went ape for him as a slimy, effeminate cockmaster, and so did the National Society of Film Critics, who gave him a trophy for the role.
When my friend and I were teens in 1983, we saw Rumble Fish. We had never seen a male movie star the compellingly enigmatic sexual equivalent of Mickey Rourke as "The Motorcycle Boy." We were angsty and thought we were sophisticated -- the commercial constructs of teen lust didn't work on us; we were immune to Matt Dillon. But Mickey Rourke pressed all the right teen heartache buttons - not the actor so much as the role: a soft spoken, self-loathing peer leader , poetically depressed, colorblind, half-deaf; a torturously sober and intellectual hipster, doomed to an ignominious small-town fate. Francis Ford Coppola was in his S.E. Hinton phase and nicely inspired; Rumble Fish is an art film for teenagers, and it works. Time-lapse photography skitters black and white clouds fast across the sky to vamping snare-drums, to suggest the overabundance of time in youth quickly becoming the lack of time in old age. The sad smile on Rourke's elvish, acne-scarred face reveals that the Motorcycle Boy, with his greasy hair and unfiltered cigarette, intimately knew the secrets of Man's Frailty, and it confined him to the hell of infinite pity. "That's a deep motherfucker, man," says the old black guy in the pool hall, of The Motorcycle Boy, (as we angry beatnik girls liquefied in the audience). "He's like... royalty in exile." The role, now, is exemplary of the best use of the damaged charm of Mickey Rourke: Existential Fonzie. Sensitive, empathetic and sorrowful, with a junkie's whisper-soft voice during even the worst emotional violence.
Rourke's next big role, in The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984), is more of his tough cookie, sexy criminal schtick. The oily pompadour that is his hair in virtually every movie reaches its most outrageous elevation here. Daryl Hannah is his dimwit aerobic instructor girlfriend whose role primarily consists of pulling her pants on and off. This film marks the beginning of a standard Rourke movie theme: a basic dislike for women, or at least the stupid female roles that always seem to disgrace his scripts. He has all the power: Daryl slaps him, he smiles that Fuck You smile, flips up the collar of his leather blazer, and walks away. She bleats "Charlie!" in her midriff leotard, he keeps walking. It seems that this role inspired Hollywood to cast Rourke whenever they needed a guy to casually and cruelly dominate whimpering, undressed females.
If any one sin could be said to be responsible for the downfall of Mickey Rourke, that sin would probably be Vanity. While managing, to his credit, not to fall into the single-character, one-dimensional tough-guy glue-trap that macho actors like DeNiro or Nicholson sunk into, Rourke suffered from a different kind of hubris: though essentially an emotionally fearless actor with commendable flair for vulnerability, naked despair and believable accents, he continually chose characters who were either fucking or fighting.
Rourke's credibility was most harmed, it seems, by his slide into mainstream softcore.
9 1/2 Weeks (1986), Rourke's recognized star-turn, features him as "John," a smirking Wall Street sadist. He feeds Kim Basinger like a baby, he buys her toys and balloons and does cruel and nasty sex to her. The movie is grotesque; Basinger's character is shriekingly infantile, down to pigeon toes and white ankle socks, and absurdly obedient; Rourke is just creepy, and the role seems to tap into a dangerous reservoir of abject misanthropy and scumminess in the actor. It's not all his fault; Basinger comes off as so shrill, moronic and embarrassing, at a certain point you are rooting for Mickey to hit her with a belt (Basinger is said to have referred to her co-star, for unspecified reasons, as "the human ashtray."). Rourke comes off as ugly and jaded in 91/2 Weeks in a way that suggests a deeper level of psychic disease than his character alone is responsible for. Perhaps he resented being the vehicle which brought S&M home to the office girls of America. Who could blame him.
1987 was, for kabalistic Hollywood reasons, the Year of the Rourke, with 3 of his better movies coming out one atop the other.
Angel Heart (1987) offered Rourke a meaty role and a healthy return to being 'actorly' - but his respectable performance was buried beneath the public's tittering shock at his willingness to enact "controversial," "X-rated" pumping-buttock sex shots with a thrashing Lisa Bonet. Rourke pulls off an entirely believable Brooklyn accent, and has a very legitimate moment of bottomless despair as the Faustian plot is revealed. Angel Heart is a good example, among many, of Rourke's ability to pull off emotionally gymnastic roles; he never shrank from painful and weepy territory that fellow Tough but Pretty actors like Steve McQueen deliberately avoided. Sensationalism and soft porn robbed him, here, of what might have been real kudos for his skill.
Rourke is most universally beloved for his portrayal of Charles Bukowski's alter ego Henry Chinaski in Barfly. While a bit over-the-top, the role is funky, ugly and lovable in a way his other characters were not. Audiences must have breathed a collective sigh of relief to finally see Rourke in a role that wasn't consumed by self-loathing. Barfly contains the closest Rourke comes, in his entire career, to is a moment of unqualified happiness, during the oft-quoted victory toast: "To my friends!" Bukowski wrote about Rourke, giving him the name Jack Bledsoe in his roman-a-clef "Hollywood," a book about the making of Barfly. Bukowski liked Rourke, and was fairly dazzled by him. There is a good scene wherein Bledsoe (Rourke) has brought his obnoxiously fabulous Hollywood Harley Davidson crew to the set, and is introducing them to Bukowski:
"His buddies leaned against the bar, backs to the bar, facing the crowd. They each held a beer bottle, except for Jack who had a 7-Up. They were dressed in leather jackets, scarves, leather pants, boots.... Jack introduced us to each of his buddies. 'This is Blackjack Harry...' 'Hi, man...' 'This is The Scourge...' 'Hello there...' 'This is the Nightworm...' 'Hey, hey!' 'This is Dogcatcher...' 'Too much!' 'This is 3-Ball Eddie...' 'God damn...' 'This is FastFart...' 'Pleased to meet ya...' 'And Pussykiller...' 'Yeah...' And that was it. They all seemed to be fine fellows but they looked a little on-stage..."
Starring in Prayer for the Dying (1987) gave Rourke a lifelong affection for the IRA - he bears a tattoo of their emblem.
Homeboy, 1988, which Rourke helped write, lands the actor close to himself; he plays dumb-ass, luckless boxer "Johnny Walker," a punchy, feral, kicked junkyard dog. One gets the feeling that this is a character Rourke really identifies with; turbulent, violent and rebellious in an ill-advisedly Quixotic way. He utilizes a Bill Murray, dislocated Caddyshack jaw, and a totally acceptable Southern accent. The scene with the most unctuous music involves Johnny Walker having an argument, and jumping out of a car on a bridge. He tries to beat up the car; he rails, he threatens traffic, and ends up walking drunk in driving rain in the middle of a busy road. One feels these raging moments of worthless self-sabotage are familiar Rourke territory. His co-star, flat-faced Deborah Feuer, became his wife for a little while - their chemistry seems lopsided and doomed, even onscreen.
Johnny Handsome, 1989 while a dumb movie, probably features Rourke's most moving performance. During a scene when the doctors take his bandages off, the man who was formerly a hydrocephalic monster with massive cranio-facial deformities is suddenly revealed in a post-surgery miracle as having Mickey Rourke's face. He cries with joy and gratitude. It is particularly moving when you consider that in Rourke's real life, shortly thereafter, he started out as a man with a beautiful face and ended up undergoing numerous surgeries and voluntary beatings to become unusually scary-looking. One imagines what he felt when his real bandages came off, after having lived this moment on film.
Francesco, 1989, wherein Rourke is cast in the unlikely role of St. Francis of Assisi, is notable only for a scene where the saint is rolling around naked in snow and his tattoo is visible.
Wild Orchid (1990 ) is a miserably stupid and sleazy wank film with the dubious distinction of being the place where the lives of Rourke and model Carré Otis collided head-on, like a big motorcycle accident.
Here, Rourke's outsides began to match his tumultuous insides. His face-lift looks too fresh - he's having trouble moving his mouth, and his forehead, so expressive in Diner and Rumblefish, is way too smooth, motionless and shiny, like a balloon dipped in Clinique bronzer. He can't smirk anymore. His eyes seem pinched; his crow's feet are disturbingly gone. His eyebrows are too light, and they don't move. Eye jobs, for the first year at least, make the recipient's eyes appear smaller; they lose any roundness below during the surgical elimination of under-eye-bags. Rourke's black eyes lost their ability to transmit emotion.
The movie is wretched in that it isn't even viable as smut; there's way too much abysmally stupid "dialogue" and "plot." It boasts perhaps the worst script ever, not helped by the fact that Otis delivers lines like a one-armed UPS guy delivers aquarium tanks. The entire movie is one long wait for the smutty finish. There is a whole lot of panting-foley, particularly during the "controversial" final scene wherein Rourke's box-browned abdominal muscles gnash and dilate while grinding into Otis' pornographically rectangular strip of pubic hair. The legend that was "leaked" from the "set" was that the two "actors" couldn't "control themselves" during this big sex scene, and despite presence of the entire camera crew had "actual penetration." Yeh right. What did happen was that Rourke and Otis ended up together, sharing, by all reports, a bloody kind of soul connection. "We were both really wounded kids," a now sober and "deliberately celibate" Otis recently explained to Christopher Goodwin of the London Times.
This is the period of time where Rourke stopped having anything effeminate about him at all. One wonders if the inevitable rumors that he was gay triggered some kind of barbaric, street-kid homophobia that made him kill off the sexily feminine, feline aspects of his persona.
Otis, around this time, was a Calvin Klein model, when the designer was going through his 'biker' phase; arguably inspired by the heavy Harley Davidson fetishizing-scene that was happening in Hollywood at the time, spearheaded by Rourke and Otis. I was unable to find any information on Rourke's artistic photography hobby, which flourished during this time, which primarily featured nude, black-and-white shots of Otis covered in motor oil.
In 1991, in addition to making the appalling (and double-appallingly popular) Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, the film where Rourke's abysmal tough-guy hubris came to roost and killed all of his artistic credibility, Rourke quit acting, which he derided for being "a womanly profession," and started boxing professionally again. Whatever his loutish comments, a closer investigation suggests that he was deeply hurt by the fact that Hollywood was not a meritocracy, and that the system, media and machine alike, never recognized that he really was a good actor. Though he won several fights, he suffered a broken cheekbone, two broken ribs, a broken toe, four broken knuckles, and a split tongue and a mashed nose. By the time he stopped boxing in 1995, he was broke, and his Beverley Hills home was repossessed for failure to make payments. He had to go back to the movies.
Rourke and Otis were deeply in love, but really, really bad for each other. They married in 1992 and divorced in 1994, but reconciled shortly thereafter. He stalked her. There was a well-publicized incident of Otis being beaten black and blue that resulted in Rourke's arrest in 1994; previous to that there was an "accidental shooting" wherein Otis took a bullet while hanging around a film set with Rourke in Arizona. Otis now claims she was strung out on heroin a good deal of that time in response to Mickey's numerous infidelities. She is now a sober, rehabilitated Buddhist and in-demand plus-size model. Rourke has spent a good deal of time over the years groveling to get her back.
I used to see them at Gold's Gym in Hollywood a few times a week, in '95; it was the general consensus that they looked like they'd been living on nothing but Ho Ho's and bourbon for the last 18 months, and in Mickey's case, steroids. Rourke became enraged at "China Beach" star Jeff Kober for speaking to Otis during this time, and gave him a black eye in front of the gym.
In 1997, Rourke was reduced to making Another 9 1/2 Weeks, wherein 'John', the same sadist, is looking for kicks, but rubbing blondes' nipples with a straightrazor just doesn't do it for him anymore. His face is ruined. His upper lip is freakishly swollen, his nose puffy and flat, and one cheekbone protrudes like a purple walnut from a combination of boxing and ill-advised surgeries. Like a bad portrait tattoo of himself, Rourke, at this point, is only recognizable when you squint. His voice has a strangely alcoholic, gasping lilt to it, like Jan Michael Vincent's or Harry Dean Stanton's. The producers would have been wise to replace Rourke: he has no chi left. Angie Everhardt drags him around the screen like an arthritic dog. The worthless, if artsily-shot film is a horrifying document of how Rourke's inner demons defaced him. The French, apparently, had no problem with this devolved version of Rourke, and loved him more than ever at this point.
I saw him once in the Harry Cipriani restaurant at the Sherry Netherland in NYC in 1997. He looked like his head had been sculpted out of wet cat food. He was huge and red, his face looked minced and swollen; his hair had been aggressively re-blonded, and he resembled no one so much as the apocalyptic cartoon character RanXerox; almost wholly unrecognizable.
One wonders if Rourke might have been happier if he could have stomached more bad, cartoonish, Hollywood Stallone roles like Rambo, or Russell Crowe-type roles that called for more acting, fewer fisticuffs and less sexual boasting. His magazine portraits now, puckering in thuggy gymwear and stocking cap, suggest that he has become, in real life, a character much less complex and interesting than most of those he played onscreen. He consciously and aggressively gives off the impression that he is a dumbass tough-guy; this seems to underline that he is insecure and haplessly needy. The tougher a guy looks and act, as a general rule, the more frightened he is by life's searing personal confrontations.
The gym muscles, cosmetic surgeries and box-tanning that have become Rourke's armor only suggest how thin his skin really is. This is a man crucified by an emotional volume knob that is always on 11, who, I reckon, has done more than his share of crying. Ultimately, all the available information on Rourke paints a sad picture of an incurable pussy hound who stuck his pretty face in front of fists and butchers until it wasn't pretty anymore, who fucked up the biggest love of his life by having no self control, and screwed up his career by being unable to exact a mature compromise with the contemptible Hollywood status quo.
But for an actor superficially labeled with an idiotic "Bad Boy" image, he didn't spare himself by coasting by on a ridiculous image. His heart was full of bloody holes that he generously shared with audiences, much like a cat brings headless chipmunks to the door as an act of love. He worked hard, and turned out some pearls that the swine never picked up on.
I read one report of Rourke staggering down the street in LA with several Chihuahuas, talking to himself. He got kicked out of a coffee shop for bringing his little dogs in, and without argument, went staggering off, mumbling , unable to ungrip his little dog friends long enough to buy himself coffee. Men with torrential feelings invariably become lonely monsters. One can only hope that now that nobody wants to see Mickey Rourke's vigorously clenching white ass in flagrante anymore, Hollywood can begin to appreciate and nurture his genuinely interesting and flexible talent for a certain flavor of desperate truth.
(For more information on Mickey Rourke, I recommend an excellent article: "Call of the Mild" by Jessica Berens, available on the "Simply Mickey Rourke" website)
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