![]() More than 60 were produced between 19, “when the Depression flattened everything,” the 5-foot, 3-inch Rooney wrote in his 1991 autobiography “Life Is Too Short.” Soon he was cast in the Mickey McGuire movie shorts, made first as silent films and then talkies. By 1926, Rooney had his first film role, as a midget, in “Not to be Trusted.” His parents split up when he was 4, and mother and son soon headed to Hollywood. When he was about 18 months old, he joined their act, singing the sentimental “Pal of My Cradle Days” while wearing a tiny tuxedo. His parents were the vaudeville entertainers Joe and Nell Yule. When he was in his early 70s, Rooney joked about the fallout from a life lived in the spotlight: “When I open a refrigerator door and the light goes on, I want to perform.” One interviewer encapsulated a repeated criticism of Rooney - that he was always acting - by describing a conversation with him as “one long monologue punctuated by pauses for applause.” A New York Times review of a 1985 touring “Sugar Babies” production called Rooney “one of those rare performers who gives his entire being to the audience in an attempt to please.” Through the long-running hit musical, Rooney once again found popular success and took the show on the road for years. “I was a famous has-been before it,” he told The Times in 1981. He can play tragedy, he can play comedy,’” Vidal said in 2007 while introducing “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the 1935 film with a teenage Rooney as Puck.ĭecades later, Rooney received an Oscar nomination for his subtly drawn performance as a horse trainer in the 1979 film “The Black Stallion.” The next year, Rooney was nominated for a Tony Award for his Broadway debut in “Sugar Babies,” a musical tribute to burlesque that he called “the resurrection of my career.” ![]() He sings, he dances, he can make you weep. said, ‘There’s only one great actor in the United States and that is Mickey Rooney. “Tennessee Williams, who knew more about actors than anybody in our time. When such leading actors of his generation as Cary Grant and Anthony Quinn were asked who was the best actor in Hollywood, they both immediately named Rooney, Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne recalled while interviewing author Gore Vidal, who said the same. In the early 1940s, Rooney earned a second Academy Award nomination as a teenager who comes of age during wartime in “The Human Comedy” and appeared opposite an adolescent Elizabeth Taylor in “National Velvet,” now considered a classic. Mayer - who was unhappy with Rooney’s off-screen antics - grab the teenage star by the lapels and yell, “You’re Andy Hardy! You’re America!” They were among the most popular movie series of all time, according to film critic Leonard Maltin.Ī story the late director Billy Wilder often told illustrates how important Rooney was to MGM. During his initial burst of fame, Rooney broke through as a dramatic actor playing the young tough in the 1938 film “Boys Town” and starring with Judy Garland in a series of popular musicals that included 1939’s “Babes in Arms,” which brought him the first of four Oscar nominations.īetween 19, Rooney portrayed the relentlessly positive Andy Hardy in 15 MGM feature films that presented an idealized portrait of American family life.
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