Mickey Rourke: The bruiser is back

Hollywood is a sucker for a heart-warming tale of redemption after adversity; the movie industry can strip a hero of a charmed existence and build him back up into the all-American dream in 90 minutes with such ease and uniformity these films might have dropped off a factory assembly line. But when one of Hollywood's own takes a tumble, the judgement is harsh and usually prolonged, as Mickey Rourke has discovered over the past two decades. And if you fell out of favour for the sort of ducks and dives and bad-boy hell-raising Rourke became known for during the 1980s, when his work was pulling in critical plaudits and comparisons to Marlon Brando and James Dean, your years in the wilderness are likely to be bitter.

But Rourke is back, and on spectacular form. He's tipped to win the best actor Oscar for his latest role in The Wrestler, in which he plays a has-been fighter still in the ring 20 years past his prime. Randy "The Ram" Robinson has retired once on health grounds only to be lured back to battle an old foe. The parallels with Rourke's own history will not be lost on even the most casual of observers, but it takes more than a little empathy to turn in the calibre of performance he is being credited for. While The Wrestler itself has already won the top award at the Venice Film Festival, Rourke has won two Critics' Association awards for best actor in the US and has been nominated for a clutch of others, including a sought-after Golden Globe.

It hasn't been entirely quiet on the Rourke front in recent years. In 2003 he had a cameo in Roberto Rodriguez's Once Upon a Time in Mexico and two years later he was part of Rodriguez's Sin City juggernaut. But if we can take anything as confirmation that Rourke is back in the Hollywood game for good this time, it should be his current spat with long-time friend Sean Penn. Penn is also on the Oscar predictions list for the film Milk, in which he plays Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person ever elected to public office in the US. According to the gossipy news website the Daily Beast, Rourke has panned Penn's performance, even going so far as to call his friend "homophobic".

Rourke denies the attack, but Piers Morgan, who has interviewed Rourke twice during the past year, interprets this as proof the actor is going to do everything he can to walk off with that Oscar. "He told me," remembers Morgan, "that the thing he's learnt about winning an Oscar is you have to play the game very, very brutally. Hollywood is a hard and ruthless machine, and he'll do whatever it takes. I suspect his slagging off of Sean Penn is a direct response to the huge publicity campaign going on to win Penn the Oscar. Mickey, at his heart, is a street fighter, the most natural street fighter Hollywood's ever seen."

Winning would be Rourke's ticket back into Hollywood proper, a milieu he curiously rejected at the height of his fame through bad choices and worse behaviour, but he has continued to live there, accepting painful blows such as being recognised in a 7-Eleven as someone who "used to be a star". He officially quit in 1991, saying he had "lost respect for acting" because in Hollywood "they set the bar so low". He also found it difficult to reconcile with his tough guy exterior and called the trade "women's work".

Yet he had washed a fair amount of his own dirty laundry in public by this point. The list of once-in-a-lifetime roles he had turned down, though unconfirmed, is incredible: Beverly Hills Cop, Platoon, Rain Man, Pulp Fiction, 48 Hrs, The Silence of the Lambs, Top Gun, Highlander, Tombstone. Startling offers given he had made his name with just a few roles: with Kathleen Turner in Body Heat, in Barry Levinson's Diner, Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish and Angel Heart, after which Alan Parker declared him a "nightmare" to work with. "You never know what he's going to do," he said. But his performance in this thrilling film noir also prompted the comment "If Mickey had died after Angel Heart, he would have been remembered as James Dean or Marlon Brando".

This was uttered by Adrian Lyne, director of 9 Weeks, the 1986 film co-starring Kim Basinger that pushed Rourke towards the sleazy sex symbol territory for which he has been so well known since. His raunchy performance won him a following far more numerous than any cult movie could, but it was arguably, to continue the comparison with Brando, his Last Tango in Paris moment. He could have resurrected his reputation but instead, from then on, chose to cast himself in simplistic roles as either the sex symbol or the tough guy. In the end he bored himself and returned to boxing.

At this point many of his fans were unaware of his back story and had no idea that Rourke was more than just an on-screen bruiser. He had been boxing since the age of 14 in Miami Beach; fighting in a ring the natural progression from a violent upbringing at the hands of his police officer stepfather (who has denied their relationship was violent or unhappy in any way). Rourke was born in 1952 in the city of Schenectady in New York state to a Catholic family with French and Irish blood. His father left when he was six and his mother remarried a police officer, Eugene Addis, who already had five children of his own, and took Mickey and his brother Joey to Florida to grow up in a rough black neighbourhood of Miami Beach called Liberty City. This is something else Addis disputes, claiming the family lived in a white area called Miami Shores. Addis even disputes Rourke's claims to have been a successful amateur boxer.

Whatever the truth of his upbringing, Rourke's behaviour tallies with that of a man who has many demons to fight, real or imagined, and he hasn't given up yet. "He is an incredibly tough guy," says Morgan, who was mesmerised by Rourke when he interviewed him just after he had finished filming The Wrestler, and again for GQ very recently. "He is the most extraordinary physical presence I've ever sat down with. He had this ferocity about him and yet he was a very sensitive guy, someone who suffered a lot of abuse from his stepfather and whose brother died of cancer in his 40s, someone whose heart was broken by Carré Otis and has never mended."

Rourke met Otis, a successful international model, on the set of Wild Orchid after his marriage during the 1980s to another co-star, Debra Feuer, had ended. Wild Orchid, in which the pair were rumoured to have filmed an unsimulated sex scene, was released in 1992 and they married the same year. In 1994 Rourke was arrested for beating up his wife. She later dropped the charges but they divorced in 1998.

Rourke's only long-term relationships since have been with his coterie of miniature dogs, a bizarre appendage to a hulk of a man who has broken nearly every bone in his face and hands and many others besides, injuries which, according to Rourke, forced his visits to plastic surgeons which have left his chiselled, pretty and almost elegant features reassembled slightly off kilter on a large pudgy face.

His changed appearance – battered rather than care worn – has been mocked and teased by the media, and can't have helped his efforts to break back into acting in the late 1990s. Bits and pieces of work came along, including an embarrassing follow-up to 9 Weeks, but for most of the decade, Rourke has since confessed, he was broke. At one point he had sold his beloved motorcycles and was living off handouts from a friend just to afford groceries.

Rourke found therapy and credits his Catholic faith for his personal redemption. He has admitted to Morgan that he had contemplated suicide more than once and had even worked out how he was going to kill himself. In different interviews he has said the look from one of his beloved chihuahuas prevented him from killing himself. Another time he had planned to kill a man who had raped and beaten his former wife Otis before taking his own life, but was talked out of it by a priest.

Rourke didn't realise at the time that his struggle to find decent acting parts was down to a number of influential industry movers who refused to work with him. In 2003 he was offered the lead part opposite Nicole Kidman in In the Cut, a raunchy thriller eventually made with Meg Ryan and Mark Ruffalo, but the offer was retracted. Kidman had refused to work with him. The following year he won a role in Man on Fire, only for his big scene with Denzel Washington to be mysteriously cut.

If it sounds like Hollywood was too cruel to Rourke, he didn't play the game as he should have. As well as burning bridges on set he gained a reputation as a Hells Angels wannabe, stealing other people's women and getting into brawls. In late 2007 he was arrested in Miami for driving under the influence of alcohol. Yet it does seem a little corny that the Rourke of yesteryear be dredged from the ashes with a role that so closely resembles his own experiences. He would have continued to box himself had his health permitted it, just like his character Randy Robinson. "I think it's reminded people that he is probably one of the top three or four actors in the world, and always has been," says Morgan.

This is exactly the sort of hyperbole Rourke needs to stake his claim to the best actor Oscar. If his attack on Penn is anything to go by, the gloves are back on.

A life in brief

Born: Philip Andre Rourke, Jr, in Schenectady, New York, 16 September 1952.

Family: Lived with mother, stepfather, and eight full, half- and step-siblings. Married twice, to Debra Feuer in 1981 and Carré Otis in 1992.

Early life: After his father left, the family moved to Florida, where his mother married a Miami Beach police officer, who Rourke says beat him up. Rourke claims he became a boxer as a teenager and won 20 of his 26 fights, though his stepfather disputes it.

Career: Made his mark in Hollywood with Body Heat and Diner in 1981 and 1982. Became a major star in the 1980s, but gained a reputation as unstable and difficult to work with. Fell out of acting in the 1990s and turned to boxing; won 10 of 12 fights but never took on a serious opponent. Latterly has returned to acting, and nominated for a Golden Globe for his appearance in The Wrestler.

He says: "The little guy with the hatchet still lives inside of me, and he's sleeping now. I don't want him to wake up again."

They say: "No one believed in Mickey Rourke... He has no value as a commodity. Well, I sat with him and looked into his eyes. His eyes aren't dead. They're alive, yearning, thinking." Darren Aronofsky, director of The Wrestler