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'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.