Like his professional career torn between success and oblivion, acting and boxing, the face of the newly 70-year-old Mickey Rourke has become a symbol of these two conflicting lives. In the 1980s, he was compared to Marlon Brando for his character, and his physical charm and talent for him attracted the attention of Francis Ford Coppola, Alan Parker and other directors. Today, however, he is known to the public only as a man with a face marked by plastic surgery, and his face, thanks to the wounds of life, has become a tangible reflection of the cruel descent from the top of Hollywood.
Mickey Rourke was 12 when he won his first boxing match, kicking off an amateur career that ended in 1973 after several wins, losses and concussions. Acting appeared in his life completely by accident when a friend offered him a role in a play he was directing. At that time he fell in love with his profession and debuted in 1979 with a small role in Steven Spielberg’s 1941. Success was not long in coming and films such as Body Heat (1981), Bistro (1982) and Predatory Fish (1983) followed.
Although these titles received critical acclaim, it was not the iconic hits that would catapult him among the personalities of his time. In fact, it wasn’t until the erotic drama 9 and 1/2 Weeks (1986) that made him an instant star and made sure we would never hear the song “You can leave your hat on” again without associating it with the stripper. Kim Basinger. And while the aforementioned titles deserve to be remembered more than the erotic classics, we all remember the movie 9 and 1/2 Weeks as synonymous with this once glamorous actor. At that time, the seductive-looking 30-year-old Rourke had Hollywood at his feet.
“I thought the party would never end” Rourke told the Daily Mail in 2009. “I could stay in any hotel, buy what I wanted and take all my people out for dinner”, he recalled.
But the party is over. Between his lack of commercial success in the following years, stories that labeled him a troublemaker (director Alan Parker said he was a nightmare to work with) and thoughtless decisions (he turned down roles in films that are now considered classics, such as Top Gun, Rain Man, Pulp Fiction and The Silence of the Lambs), he felt the call of boxing again. In 1991, he temporarily closed the actor’s dressing room to return to the ring because of him “he destroyed himself” a “he did not esteem himself as an actor”, as he told Film Journal.
However, he most likely did not realize the consequences that awaited him. During his second stint in boxing, he broke his nose twice, broke his ribs, cut his tongue and had an injured cheekbone. He even suffered from short-term memory loss. Following the injuries and surgeries he underwent for facial reconstruction, he changed the image we knew as a movie star to the point that he is now a laughing stock.
In 2009, she told Mail Online that she had undergone five operations to correct her nose and one operation to reconstruct a broken cheekbone. However, as the years went by, her face became more and more subject to further changes, indicating a process of repeated cosmetic procedures. She told the Guardian “the humiliation he had experienced for five, six, seven, eight, nine, fifteen years,” self-inflicted “I lost everything, my wife, my home, my friends, my name in the industry” he explained while promoting the film The Wrestler, which brought him back to Hollywood prominence with his only Oscar nomination.
“I was paying $ 500 a month for an apartment and dogs. Nobody knew how badly I was financially. A friend would give me a few hundred to buy something to eat. I called my ex-wife, crying like a baby, trying to get her back. I was desperate. And lonely. And this has dragged on for several years “, remembers years after his second appearance in the ring.
However, despite the success of The Wrestler, he is not well regarded in the cinema today and in recent years he has made headlines more for what he says and watches than for his film work. Unfortunately, due to so many surgeries, it is more difficult for him to shine as before. And if in the aforementioned film The Wrestler his character gave him a personal bridge to the hearts of the public with a story of redemption that touched him closely, the surgical excesses for which he is being reproached today have reduced his chances. forever.
In any case, Mickey Rourke is still active in Hollywood. Next year he will appear in the horror film Cursed and has also signed on for Roman Polanski’s new film The Palace. However, his face became a vivid reminder of the descent of a man who reached the pinnacle of Hollywood, but for whom life was not as kind as we would have liked. At the age of 70 he lives surrounded by his beloved dogs and, as he admitted to Piers Morgan in 2022, he has been alone for seven years.
Zdroje: Yahoo, Daily Mail, Mail Online, The Guardian, csfd, Film Journal
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