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Mickey Rooney
Joseph Yule, Jr.
23-Sep-1920
Birthplace: Brooklyn, NY
"I'm in pretty good shape for the shape I'm in."
- Mickey Rooney at 58
Best known in his youth for playing Andy Hardy with Judy Garland as the female lead in cheerfully naive musicals that usually ended with the characters putting on an impromptu musical show. In his senior years, he often played an cheerful old mentor with a youthful spirit.
Mickey Rooney's father, Joe Yule, was a vaudeville comic and actor, and Joe Jr. was part of his parents' stage act starting at about 18 months of age. The act ended, along with his parents' marriage, after Junior walked in on his father with another woman. He made his motion picture debut at the age of five, playing an adult midget in the 1926 silent short Not to Be Trusted. Beginning at age 6, he starred in dozens of silent-era comedy shorts, playing (and billed as) "Mickey McGuire".
At 12 he became "Mickey Rooney", when his agent decided he needed a new name to land any roles beyond the McGuire shorts. "He never bothered to ask me whether I liked it", Rooney wrote in his autobiography. "This is the kind of world I was born in, one in which I had only one reason for existence: pleasing others". As an adolescent, Rooney co-starred with Judy Garland in a series of squeaky-clean MGM musicals, often revolving around the urgent need to put on a show in somebody's barn. Rooney starred in fifteen "Andy Hardy" movies, and made more than 200 other movies and half a dozen TV series. "I was a 14-year-old boy for 30 years", he says.
Among Rooney's more famous movies, he played the young a gangster in Manhattan Melodrama (1934), a goodhearted crewman in Spencer Tracy's Captains Courageous (1937), a juvenile delinquent in Tracy's Boys Town (1939), the cynical jockey and trainer in National Velvet (1944) with 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, a racist caricature of a Japanese landlord in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) with Audrey Hepburn, a bitter boxing trainer in Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962) with Anthony Quinn and Jackie Gleason, a panicked man in a pilotless plane in It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) opposite Buddy Hackett, and another horse trainer in The Black Stallion (1979) with Teri Garr. Rooney is still making movies, although they are usually low-budget direct-to-video atrocities.
He is one of Hollywood's most married men. Barbara Ann Thomason, the fifth of his eight wives and mother of four of his ten children, was murdered in 1966. The following year he married and divorced her good friend, Marge Lane.
When he appears on talk shows, Rooney almost invariably reminds audiences that he was the number one box office star of 1939, 1940 and 1941. "I was the number one star in the world, you hear me? The world!" He then regales the host with tales from his Hollywood history. He also says he came up with the stage name "Marilyn Monroe" for blonde innocent Norma Jean Baker, and lost his virginity in a brothel where the tab was paid by show-biz pal Milton Berle. He says he "discovered" Sammy Davis, Jr., and turned down the Archie Bunker role in All in the Family. He says he became a born-again Christian in the early 1970s, when an angel appeared to him in a diner. And he fondly remembers being called "the best actor America ever produced" by Laurence Olivier. At some point, credulity snaps.
In 2005, Rooney filmed a commercial for a cold remedy, in which Rooney's towel slipped off in a sauna, exposing his 84-year-old buttocks for about two seconds. The ad, scheduled to premiere during the Super Bowl, was rejected by network censors. Rooney angrily described the commercial as "a fun spot", and said "the public deserves to see it".
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Mickey Rooney was drafted into U.S. Army in 43 and sent to Europe with an entertainment unit.
Mickey's son Teddy Rooney appeared with him in Andy Hardy Comes Home (1958), portraying - who else? - Andy Hardy Jr.
Mickey was considered for the role of Archie Bunker on "All in the Family" (1971).
He originally came to Hollywood to audition for "Our Gang" (aka "The Little Rascals" (1955)), but didn't get in
According to one story, Mickey Mouse was named for Rooney. Walt Disney saw a young Rooney while he was working on the first drawings of what was to become Mickey Mouse. He asked the child actor what he thought of the drawings and also asked what his name was.
With movie appearances stretching from 1926 to 2007, totaling 81 years, his is the longest career in cinema history, surpassing that of Lillian Gish.
As of 2007, he is the only surviving screen actor to appear in silent films and still continue to act in movies into the 21st century. His film debut was in the movie Not to Be Trusted (1926) in 1926 at the age of four.
Mickey's first of eight marriages was to Ava Gardner but has been married to current wife Jan Rooney longer than all of the other seven wives combined
"People say, 'How can you be married eight times?' But I played the hand dealt me the way I was supposed to. I was friendly with most of my ex-wives. My God, there's a Mickey Rooney's Former Wives Marching Band!" --Mickey Rooney
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"The audience and I are friends. They allowed me to grow up with them. I've let them down several times. They've let me down several times. But we're all family."
--Mickey Rooney
"I didn't ask to be short. I didn't want to be short. I've tried to pretend that being a short guy didn't matter."
--Mickey Rooney
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