Short of stature, towering with talent and a complete pain in the ass to interviewers, Mickey Rooney — one of Hollywood’s true greats — died Sunday at the age of 93.
Born into a show business family, Joseph Yule Jr. first appeared on stage in his parents’ vaudeville act at 15 months, beginning a career that spanned eight decades.
During that time, he was nominated for four Academy Awards (most recently for The Black Stallion in 1980) and given two special Oscars — one for his onscreen work as a juvenile in 1939 and the other for his body of work in 1983. Onstage, he had a major success with Sugar Babies, a recreation of the heydays of burlesque, which brought him a Tony nomination in 1980, and employment for years as he tirelessly toured the country with the show.
On screen, of course, he was the perennial male ingenue in the Andy Hardy series, as well as a handful of musicals opposite Judy Garland. Light comedy came easy to him, but I prefer to remember Rooney as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), Homer Macauley in William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy (1943) and as Anthony Quinn’s trainer in 1962’s Requiem for a Heavyweight. But with 340 films and television appearances to his credit on the Internet Movie Database, there are plenty of other film roles of Rooney’s to choose from.
As a genuine entertainment legend, Rooney felt no need to cooperate, on or off a movie set. I once asked him about his reputation as a difficult person — a label well-documented in biographies of him — and he scoffed at the description.
“Who said that?” he demanded. “Believe what you want, but I’m a religious man, and I resent that. That is not true. I mean, we all go through stages. Have you ever done anything wrong? Well, I have too. I’ve made mistakes. That just means you’re a human being.”
Rooney was nothing if not human. Ask his eight wives, beginning with occasional MGM co-star, Ava Gardner, and ending with his widow Jan Chamberlin, a singer he married in 1978.
I had two encounters with Rooney. Once, while he was touring with Sugar Babies, and then six years ago when he came to Palm Beach County to receive the Legend Award from our international film festival. In both instances, he seemed to go out of his way to be generally unpleasant in the interview, with a mischievousness he incorrectly assumed was endearing.
At least he left behind a legacy of movies that will continue to entertain, especially for those who never met him.