It's five minutes into The Wrestler before it dawns on me that I've seen Randy 'the Ram' Robinson somewhere before. He's a pro-wrestler with a torso that looks as if it's been inflated with an air pump and a head of flowing platinum blond locks straight out of Spinal Tap. He's also Mickey Rourke, although it takes another five minutes before I accept that this must be true.
Even then, this realisation comes only because I know Rourke is the leading man in the film and Randy the Ram is, indisputably, the leading man. Where's the pretty boy with the sardonic smile? The last time I paid attention to Rourke's career, in the late Eighties, he was the pin-up of my sixth-form common room, the star of Rumble Fish and Angel Heart and, most infamously, of 9½ Weeks. He was an Ur-Brad Pitt, only with a crucial difference: he could act. Critic Pauline Kael first saw him in Barry Levinson's Diner in 1982 and put her finger on it: 'He has an edge and a magnetism and a pure, sweet smile that surprises you.'
Randy, on the other hand, has the face of a ravaged, old-time bruiser who's done too many cheap steroids; his eyes are puffy, his skin coarse, his fingers are slow-moving tubes of gristle, his biceps so massive his arms don't even hang straight. Viewed from a certain angle, wearing a certain expression, it's still possible, just, to see the flicker of the Rourke who once was, but it's only a flicker.
If his physical appearance is one sort of shock, the film is another. The Wrestler is his first leading man role in almost two decades and it's a genuinely affecting story of a once-successful professional wrestler who is now at the end of the road. Randy Robinson has lost practically everything there is to lose.
In places, it's almost too excruciating to watch and not just for the chairs-over-the-head, staple-gun-in-the-chest horrors of the wrestling scenes; it's the sheer, awful hopelessness of Randy's life: his soul-sapping job in a supermarket, his squalid trailer, the daughter he let down too many times, the fall from success, the man who once headlined at Madison Square Garden reduced to fighting bouts in small-town, high-school gyms.
It's a story so close to Rourke's own that in many crucial ways Rourke is Randy Robinson. He's suffered one of the most spectacular falls from grace that Hollywood has ever seen, has lived for years with its spirit-crushing consequences. When I meet him, there, on a piece of leather around his neck, is Randy's talisman, the pendant he wears before every fight: a stylised set of ram's horns. Rourke had the same jeweller make it for him in jade and he's worn it ever since. He can't help seeing himself in Randy, only he's been granted what feels like a last chance.
'Abso-fucking-lutely. Randy's living in a state of shame. Living in a state of disgrace. The humiliation that I've lived with for five, six, seven, eight, nine, 15 years. That I brought upon myself. I lost everything, the wife, the house, my friends, my name in the business. I was paying $500 a month for an apartment with my dogs. Nobody really knew how broke I was. A friend used to give me a couple of hundred of dollars a month to buy something to eat. And I'd be calling up my ex-wife and crying like a baby and trying to get her back. I was desperate. And I was all alone. And this went on for years, for years.'
He's gone from being the up-and-coming young talent, talked of in the same breath as Brando, to being a Hollywood hellraiser tooling around town in a white Rolls-Royce with a fully paid-up entourage of Cubans in gold chains, to the actor who threw it all away. In 1991, he decided he'd had enough of films and became a professional boxer. Before meeting him, I had honestly no idea what to expect; in the event, he's the kind of interviewee you wish for but almost never get: he's just so happy to talk and he's so refreshingly un-up-himself that it makes you think that all Hollywood actors could do with a bracing 15 years in the wilderness.
'You know, many years have gone by when no one wanted to sit in a room and ask me questions.... so now I'm grateful. I'm thankful for it. It's been a long, long time.'
He's transformed, physically, again. He's lost the 30 pounds he gained for the role, his face, though still odd - he's had four lots of reconstructive surgery on it from his fighting days - has de-puffed and he's wearing glasses and a stylish pinstripe suit. He didn't write the film (although he did, with director Darren Aronofsky's consent, rewrite the dialogue for all his scenes) or come up with the concept, but it's still the most autobiographical film you'll see this year.
The poignancy of Randy's situation is that he was once somebody. Does it make it worse than if you'd never made it?
'It's way, way worse. It's so much worse. Especially if you're living in a shithole town like LA, a town that's based on envy, you were once somebody and you fuck it up. For me, it was over a 15-year period. And you are reminded of it every single day. And I behaved and misbehaved so terribly that they let you know it in a real nasty way. But the thing is I caused all my own misery.'
The film has had its first major outing at the Venice Film Festival only a couple of weeks before I meet him. It won the Golden Lion for best film and Wim Wenders, the president of the jury, said: 'This is for a film with a truly heartbreaking performance in every sense of the word. And if I say heartbreaking, you know I mean Mickey Rourke.'
It is. And it's made Rourke this year's unlikeliest Oscar contender, the one nobody saw coming. The personal redemption narrative, the physical transformation, the macho fight scenes - it's got Academy Award written all over it. If that sounds disparaging, it's not meant unkindly, because having now met Mickey Rourke, there's no one I'd like to see win an Oscar more.
His story of personal redemption beats even Randy's and an Oscar would be its epiphanic climax. He'd almost certainly take his geriatric chihuahua, Loki, whom he calls his 'best friend' up on stage; she spends the interview perched on his sofa in a cashmere jumper and a diamante collar being hand-fed bacon pieces and Evian water. And he'll surely weep, as he does at one point during our interview. He gets so choked up at his failures and even more so at his success which has come after so, so long that he still can't quite believe it's happening.
It nearly didn't. Nobody would bankroll a film with Rourke as a leading man. Aronofsky fought for him and turned it from a big-budget epic into a no-budget indie just to have him. And in doing so, he inspired in Rourke the kind of devotion that has produced the performance of his career.
'For so many years, I'd sit and talk to the dog, and say, I'm not coming back, it's over.'
You'd accepted that, had you?
'Not totally.'
You never quit?
'I was never going to quit. That's not in me. But I thought, I've fucked it up. I didn't think I'd come back to this level ever again. I hoped I would but I thought too much time had gone by.'
But is there not a danger of doing a Randy? Of messing it all up again?
'Never. Not as hard as I've worked to change. No. I've been to hell, I'm not going back there. I've been to hell. And I had to stay there for so long, it was like, no, no way. I was talking to my priest because I was saying I'm scared, it's such a nice feeling to feel proud again, not to be living in shame and disgrace and failure. I remember walking into a restaurant one time and people looking at me, and it was like Jack the Ripper had walked in.'
I hope he's right. His publicist Paula is lurking in the corridor outside his room and when I ask him whether he thinks his looks suit him better now than when he was in his twenties, he says: 'I see photographs of me from back in 9½ Weeks and I can't even look at them. It's like... she won't let me say the c-word, but I say, who's that c-? Where are you, Paula? I've already been scolded. She won't let me say it.'
Possibly because in an interview a couple of years ago, he called Tom Cruise one (for his pronouncements against therapy), which got him in all sorts of trouble. But Paula's not there all the time and I can't help worrying for him. A couple of weeks after I meet him, he's accosted by a paparazzo who asks him if it's true he's having an affair with Evan Rachel Wood, the actress who plays his daughter in The Wrestler, and he says: 'She's a good friend, that's it. And tell that faggot who wrote all that shit in the paper I'd like to break his fucking legs.'
He issues an apology almost immediately, but he still has an ability to shoot his mouth off that might yet be his undoing. Oscar nominees don't call people faggots.
It's taken him years and years of therapy to get to this point, hence his rage at Cruise. He says it saved his life and although he talks the talk of a man who's been immersed in therapy-speak, it's because he didn't even have a language for it before, to articulate the problem at the root of all his problems: the violent abuse he was subjected to as a child at the hands of his stepfather.
He was born in upstate New York, but his parents separated when he was five and his mother remarried and moved to Miami. Do you still have any contact with your mother?
'I haven't. I was angry with her for my whole life for what she did. Because she turned her back to it and she was supposed to be responsible for me and Joe [Rourke's brother]. She didn't. She let it happen. And it happened for a decade. And it was easier to just get mad than to deal with feeling so small and abandoned. But I was kind of 50-50 about her until Joe died, two and a half, three years ago. Because he was still upset. And so when he died, I stopped talking to her. Completely. And then about three months ago, she got diagnosed with Alzheimer's. So now I'm kind of OK with her because she doesn't remember what happened.
'My grandmother was the one I really loved and who took care of me and Joe. We stayed with her at weekends and other times and when I had to leave and go back to the other house, it was terrifying. And she died, last month, aged 99. A week before she went, she said to my half sister, "If I've got to lay in this goddamn bed another day, at least I could have a good-looking man next to me." She was a real character. She'd be rolling my cigarettes before school.'
Rourke's escape from his miserable home life was boxing. He trained at Miami's 5th Street Gym, from where Muhammad Ali had sprung and, by 16, he was sparring with Luis Rodriguez, the number one ranked middleweight, ahead of Rodriguez's world title fight. Two severe concussions put paid to his hopes of turning pro and he fell into acting almost by accident.
A friend at the University of Miami told him about a play he was directing, Deathwatch by Jean Genet, and how the man playing the role of Green Eyes had dropped out. Rourke got the part and was hooked almost instantly. He gave up boxing, borrowed $400 from his sister and went to New York. For years he worked in menial jobs there, taking private lessons with an acting teacher from the Actors Studio, until eventually, he got in. For his audition piece, a father-son scene, his acting teacher made him go and find his real father and it led Elia Kazan to say of his scene that it was the best audition piece he'd seen in 30 years.
Rourke still rhapsodises about his time there, studying with Kazan, Scorsese and Pacino and he got noticed enough to land a tiny part in Body Heat in 1981 and that really was that. He was on screen for only a few minutes but it led to bigger and better parts, among them the cult classics Diner, with Barry Levinson, and Rumble Fish with Francis Ford Coppola and the brilliant noirish thriller Angel Heart in which he played opposite Robert De Niro. Most notoriously and explicitly, there was the 1986 erotic thriller 9½ Weeks with Kim Basinger. It was roundly panned by the critics but it cemented his sex-symbol reputation. For a period of time, he was perhaps the most lusted-after man on the planet.
And from there it all started falling apart. His great love was acting, but it was all the rest of it he simply couldn't deal with. Adrian Lyne, the director of 9½ Weeks, says that if he'd died after making Angel Heart, he'd be James Dean. Instead, he became 'difficult'. He fought with directors, with producers. He did the undoable and badmouthed Sam Goldwyn Jr. When Dustin Hoffman called to offer him Tom Cruise's part in Rain Man, he forgot to call him back. And he made terrible choice after terrible choice, turning down Kevin Costner's part in The Untouchables, roles in Platoon and Silence of the Lambs and, years later, John Travolta's part in Pulp Fiction.
His first marriage to actress Debra Feuer broke down and his second to Carré Otis, who starred opposite him in Wild Orchid, was a disaster from the off. He was out of control, she was a heroin addict, and they divorced in 1998, after she brought and then dropped charges of spousal abuse. It hasn't stopped him spending the last 10 years pining for her, however.
'Pine? No, there's got to be a worse word than that. Not being here would have been much, much easier. It was something really special, but it was just fire on fire. I waited 10 years for her to come back, until Joe died. And when Joe died I stopped waiting for her.
'I won't compromise. Carré was thunder and lightning. If I can't have thunder and lighting then I won't have anything. It'll be a one-night stand here and there, but I'm not going to compromise. I can't.'
His personal life was messy, his professional life messier. He did a series of terrible films just for the money, lost all respect for himself and decided the only way out of it all was to go back to boxing.
'It was something that I loved to do and that I enjoyed; that was very therapeutic for me. It's very pure, there's no grey. I was able to just let out and get away from that acting crap. Because I had lost the passion and the desire and the respect for the acting and it really maybe wasn't the acting, it was that I really lost all of those things from myself.'
He was good, too, undefeated in eight fights, earning $1m a year, three fights away from a cruiserweight title fight, until he was forced to retire for neurological reasons. His equilibrium still suffers if he's tired or drunk, but it's his face that paid the biggest price. His nose was rebuilt with cartilage from his ear and a series of operations altered his looks for ever.
But in a way, it maybe suits him better. He never felt handsome. And when he became a pin-up, he hated it. He looks more like the way he feels these days.
'You know the song, "I fought the law and the law won"? Well I fought the system and it kicked the living shit out of me. I said to my psychiatrist one day, "Sean Penn, Al Pacino, none of these guys has been through this." And he said, "None of those guys would know how to fall as far as you have; only you could fall this far."'
He's watched only his wrestling scenes from the film so far. 'I'm proud of some of the moves I did. I trained real hard.' One of the money-saving devices was to put on real wrestling matches and simply have Rourke come in and do his stuff in the middle of it. But he can't even talk about the scene in which Randy goes to work in a supermarket deli. Aronofsky says: 'He just felt the shame of Randy the Ram.'
But then, there are at least two elements in it which seem to have come directly from Rourke's life: the crushing humiliation of being recognised as somebody who used to be somebody, which has happened intermittently to Rourke for years, and the moment when Randy, in a moment of sheer emotional torture, thrusts his hand into a sausage slicing machine. A few years ago, Rourke described to a journalist how he deliberately sliced the top of his little finger off (and had hours of microsurgery to sew it back on).
Worse, he tells me: 'Loki's father, Beau Jack, is probably responsible for keeping me here. I remember sitting in the closet one day, and thinking, I'm not going through this any more, and I looked down and her dad went like this. He looked at me and it meant who's going to take care of him, if I'm not here.'
You were on the verge of... doing something silly?
'Well, you know, I actually had already done a few times and I was thrown back, luckily. I mean, I'm very fortunate to be here.'
The greatest difference between him and Randy is that Randy is doing everything he can to form a human connection with another person, whereas Rourke hasn't had a relationship since Otis. Loki is his best friend. He struggles even to remember the names of the women he's slept with. And it doesn't take a psychiatrist to figure out why he rescues abandoned chihuahuas, the more abused, the better. But while therapy has made him take responsibility for his actions, he's brutal about the mistakes he's made.
'That's what my priest says. He gave me a book and circled the word "forgiveness". But you know I was the one who fucked up, only me.'
But then that's not entirely true...because as a child you were a victim.
'But I don't want to carry that. I don't want that fucking label. I don't want to be a victim. I wish there was another fucking word. I'm not having that define me.'
Except it does. You'll be hard pushed to meet somebody as broken as Mickey Rourke. His emotions are so close to the surface. And when he starts telling me about how he held his brother Joe in his arms as he lay dying of cancer, he starts to cry. I don't know what to do. There's a coffee table between us. Should I give him a hug? But I can't hug Mickey Rourke, it's ridiculous. He sobs quietly on the sofa, stroking his ageing chihuahua with the cashmere jumper and the diamante collar and it's hard not to sob with him. But then he's a great actor, Rourke, not that I think he's putting it on, but when he feels emotion, somehow it's as if you feel it too. Go and see The Wrestler and you'll see what I mean. I watched it with a bunch of hard-boiled film critics who all looked slightly red around the eyes at the end.
If you knew what you'd have to go through to get to this point, would you go through it all again?
'You mean the 15 years? Of penance and shame? Maybe not.'
But maybe you wouldn't be the actor you are today?
'That's true too. But I didn't think it was going to take 15 years. I thought maybe I could come in two or three and things would fall into place. But I wasn't a little bad. I was real bad. And you pay the price for what you do in this life.'
But he has, surely, by now, hasn't he? Bruce Springsteen wrote a song for the movie, also called 'The Wrestler', as a favour to Rourke with whom he goes way back. It includes the line: 'Have you ever seen a one-legged dog making its way down the street?/ If you've ever seen a one-legged dog, then you've seen me.' And it's true. Of Rourke and Randy both. I'm just crossing my fingers that he doesn't screw up this, his last and final leg.
The Wrestler is released in the UK on 16 January 2009
Takes from Mickey Rourke's film career
Body Heat
1981
Rourke first attracted interest with his performance in Lawrence Kasdan's film noir, appearing alongside William Hurt and Kathleen Turner. The film centres on a plot between Florida lawyer Ned Racine (Hurt) and femme fatale Matty Walker (Turner) to murder Walker's wealthy husband and claim his estate. Rourke plays Teddy Lewis, an explosives expert who is enlisted to help cover up the crime. The film, which also launched the career of Turner, was a critical success and The Observer's Philip French described Rourke as 'one of the discoveries of Lawrence Kasdan's impressive directorial debut'.
Diner
1982
Rourke shone as ladies' man Robert 'Boogie' Sheftell in Barry Levinson's directorial debut, a coming of age drama set in Baltimore in 1959. The film explores the changing relationships between five male high-school friends, now in their early twenties, who are reunited to attend the wedding of one of the group and who meet and discuss their lives at their teenage hangout, the Fells Point Diner. Sheftell, who is sweating under a large gambling debt, supplies one of the film's most famous scenes, a scabrous practical joke in which he invites a girl to share his popcorn at the cinema with unexpected results.
Angel Heart
1987
Rourke starred alongside Lisa Bonet and Robert De Niro in this metaphysical film noir adapted from a novel by William Hjortsberg and directed by Alan Parker. In it, he plays private detective Harry Angel, who is employed by Louis Cyphre (De Niro) to hunt down a former singer who owes Cyphre an unspecified debt. The trail takes him from New York to New Orleans where he becomes a suspect in a series of gruesome murders. The film received a mixed response on its release but achieved cult status on video. Philip French described Rourke as 'terrific as the seedy gumshoe born with a greasy spoon in his mouth'.
Sin City
2005
After a succession of minor roles and straight-to-video releases, Rourke returned to mainstream cinema with Sin City, an adaptation of stories from Frank Miller's graphic novel series. Rourke plays Marv in one strand of the film's episodic plot, a man of almost superhuman strength who has been framed for the murder of his lover and sets out to exact revenge on her killers. The film was one of the first to be shot primarily on a digital backlot with actors performing against screens and background details added in post-production. The technique helped the film win the technical grand prize at Cannes.
The Wrestler
2008
In his first mainstream starring role in almost two decades, Rourke plays Randy 'the Ram' Robinson, a once succesful professional wrestler fallen on hard times. Forced to retire after suffering a heart attack and working in a supermarket, he plans a redemptive comeback bout. Directed by Darren Aronofsky, the film won the Golden Lion at this year's Venice Film Festival. Variety critic Todd McCarthy described Rourke's portrayal as 'a galvanising, humorous, deeply moving portrait that instantly takes its place among the great iconic screen performances'.
Ally Carnwath
Biography
Born Philip Andre Rourke Jr in New York, 1956 to Ann and Philip Andre Rourke Sr, an amateur bodybuilder. His parents divorce when he is five. His mother remarries and moves Mickey and his brother, Joe, and sister, Patricia, to Miami. Mickey becomes an amateur boxer at the Boys Club of Miami and the 5th Street Gym, before retiring in 1972 after twice being concussed. Moves to New York and studies at the Actors Studio.
1979 Debuts in Spielberg's 1941.
1981 Small part in Body Heat. Marries actress Debra Feuer. They divorce in 1989.
1982 Breakthrough role in Diner
1983 Praised for his performance in Rumble Fish and becomes a sex symbol after role in erotic thriller 9½ Weeks (1986).This is followed in 1987 by Barfly and Angel Heart
1990 Wild Orchid, in which he stars opposite his lover, Carré Otis, is critically panned. Rourke gives up acting to become a professional boxer.
1992 Marries Carré Otis.
1994 Arrested for domestic violence. Otis drops the charges.
1997 Returns to acting. Takes supporting roles in films including The Rainmaker and Buffalo 66 (1998).
1998 Divorces Otis.
2005 Several awards for his role as Marv in Sin City
2008 The Wrestler wins the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival.
Imogen Carter