Why is mickey rourke so ugly

The younger, more dedicated Rourke was a raunchy pretty boy but an indisputable actor. Clearly, his discomfort with the feminine quality of acting, or pretense, pushed him to enact masculinity as if gender were an extreme sport.

His rivals in the business of undoing are James Dean, who got off on burning his body with cigarettes, playing with rough trade, and speeding in what would be his death car; and Montgomery Clift, another tormented lovely, who swallowed pills by the roll, and also sliced his face and body apart with a car.

There is, of course, Brando as well, who inflated his body to zeppelin size in a bizarre war against his unspeakable good looks. Yet, it is hard to think of a contemporary actor with the same kind of commitment to mutilating himself, the self adored by so many.

In terms of self-destruction, the young fatality Heath Ledger comes to mind, or River Phoenix. While everyone wrote Rourke off as a freak, he never seemed happier than in the last few years, carrying his tiny Chihuahuas around and feeding them from his plate. When supermodels complain that beauty is a curse, they are mocked, yet Gia Carangi, for example, lived out that curse to its direst extreme, dying painfully after years of self-abuse.

There is no sympathy available for a sad celebrity, and whenever one is in pain, they are chided for having everything and, therefore, nothing to complain about. What if everything was nothing to Rourke and to other self-immolating "haves" who, in their minds, have not? In The Wrestler , Rourke's character continues to beef up his body with steroids and suntans, and to maintain his flowing blond hair, in spite of his very apparent decay. He is, then, a crazed Gorgeous George.

The flamboyant wrestler was not a bleeder, but he was famous for saying "Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat! What was he cheating us of? The shearing of the hair is reminiscent of Rourke's wounded face. Do some stars cheat us of their appearance because they wish to be recognized for a less tangible, less visible quality? Or are they like fighter pilots who, to cite a memorable analogy used by the American novelist Richard Price, draw targets on useless parts of their fuselage, to protect what is both valuable and vulnerable in themselves?

If Rourke has won and lost, and ultimately cheated us of his hot movie stardom, he is proving to be a true fighter by going the distance and managing to keep his talent, under any guise, alive. Rumer Willis stated this week that as a girl she would match her crushes' names to hers, with odd results, despairing that "Rumer Depp" never sounded right.

American women are adopting capuchin monkeys at an alarming rate, and nurturing them as babies. This week an Enquirer ad offers, for sale, Little Umi, a "quality silicone" replica, who is "cuddle" ready, and never climbs the drapes screaming and flinging excrement at its demented mommy. Troubled Diff'rent Strokes star Gary Coleman is in trouble again for allegedly hitting a fan with his car. Rourke is most universally beloved for his portrayal of Charles Bukowski's alter ego Henry Chinaski in "Barfly.

Audiences must have breathed a collective sigh of relief to see Rourke in a role that wasn't consumed by self-loathing. There is a good scene in which Bledsoe Rourke has brought his obnoxiously fabulous Hollywood Harley-Davidson crew to the set, and is introducing them to Bukowski:.

They each held a beer bottle, except for Jack who had a 7-Up. They were dressed in leather jackets, scarves, leather pants, boots Jack introduced us to each of his buddies.

Starring in "Prayer for the Dying" gave Rourke a lifelong affection for the Irish Republican Army -- he bears a tattoo of the paramilitary organization's emblem. One gets the feeling that this is a character Rourke really identifies with: turbulent, violent and rebellious in an ill-advised, quixotic way. He utilizes a "Caddyshack"-style Bill Murray dislocated jaw and a totally acceptable Southern accent. The scene with the most unctuous music involves Johnny having an argument and jumping out of a car on a bridge.

He tries to beat up the car; he rails, he threatens traffic, and ends up walking home drunk through driving rain in the middle of a busy road. One feels these raging moments of worthless self-sabotage are familiar Rourke territory. His costar, flat-faced Deborah Feuer, became his wife for a little while -- their chemistry seems lopsided and doomed, even on-screen. During a scene when the doctors take his bandages off, the man who was formerly a hydrocephalic monster with massive cranio-facial deformities is suddenly revealed in a post-surgery miracle as having Mickey Rourke's face.

He cries with joy and gratitude. It is particularly moving when you consider that in Rourke's real life, shortly thereafter, he started out as a man with a beautiful face and ended up undergoing numerous surgeries and voluntary beatings to become unusually scary-looking. One imagines what he felt like when his real bandages came off, after having lived this moment on film.

Francis of Assisi, is notable only for a scene where the saint is rolling around naked in snow and his tattoo is visible. His face-lift looks too fresh -- he's having trouble moving his mouth, and his forehead, so expressive in "Diner" and "Rumble Fish," is way too smooth, motionless and shiny, like a balloon dipped in Clinique bronzer.

He can't smirk anymore. His eyes seem pinched; his crow's feet are disturbingly gone. His eyebrows are too light, and they don't move. Eye jobs, for the first year at least, make the recipient's eyes appear smaller; they lose any roundness below during the surgical elimination of under-eye bags. Rourke's black eyes lost their ability to transmit emotion. The movie is wretched in that it isn't even viable as smut; there's way too much abysmally stupid dialogue and plot.

It boasts perhaps the worst script ever, not helped by the fact that Otis delivers lines the way a one-armed UPS guy delivers aquarium tanks. The entire movie is one long wait for the smutty finish. There are a whole lot of panting Foley effects, particularly during the "controversial" final scene wherein Rourke's box-browned abdominal muscles gnash and dilate while grinding into Otis' pornographically rectangular strip of pubic hair.

The legend that was "leaked" from the "set" was that the two "actors" couldn't "control themselves" during this big sex scene, and despite the presence of the entire camera crew had "actual penetration. What did happen was that Rourke and Otis ended up together, sharing, by all reports, a bloody kind of soul connection.

This is the period of time when Rourke stopped having anything effeminate about him at all. One wonders whether the inevitable rumors that he was gay triggered some kind of barbaric, street-kid homophobia that made him kill off the sexily feminine, feline aspects of his persona.

Otis was a Calvin Klein model around this time, when the designer was going through his "biker" phase. Arguably this was inspired by the heavy Harley-Davidson-fetishizing scene that was happening in Hollywood at the time, spearheaded by Rourke and Otis. I was unable to find any information on Rourke's artistic-photography hobby, which flourished during this period and primarily featured nude black-and-white shots of Otis covered in motor oil. Whatever his loutish comments, a closer investigation suggests that he was deeply hurt by the fact that Hollywood was not a meritocracy, and that the system, media and machine alike, never recognized that he really was a good actor.

Though he won several fights, he suffered a broken cheekbone, two broken ribs, a broken toe, four broken knuckles, a split tongue and a mashed nose. By the time he stopped boxing in , he was broke and his Beverly Hills home had been repossessed.

He had to go back to the movies. Rourke and Otis were deeply in love, but really, really bad for each other. They married in and divorced in , but reconciled shortly thereafter. He stalked her. There was a well-publicized incident of Otis being beaten black and blue that resulted in Rourke's arrest in ; previous to that there was an "accidental shooting" wherein Otis took a bullet while hanging around a film set with Rourke in Arizona.

Otis now claims she was strung out on heroin a good deal of that time in response to Mickey's numerous infidelities. She is now a sober, rehabilitated Buddhist and in-demand plus-size model. Rourke has spent a good deal of time over the years groveling to get her back. I used to see them at Gold's Gym in Hollywood a few times a week in ; it was the general consensus that they looked like they'd been living on nothing but Ho-Hos and bourbon for the previous 18 months, and in Mickey's case, steroids.

Rourke once became enraged at "China Beach" star Jeff Kober for speaking to Otis and gave him a black eye in front of the gym. Rourke's face is ruined. His upper lip is freakishly swollen, his nose puffy and flat, and one cheekbone protrudes like a purple walnut, presumably from a combination of boxing and ill-advised surgeries. Like a bad portrait tattoo of himself, Rourke is only recognizable when you squint. The producers would have been wise to replace Rourke: He has no chi left.

Angie Everhart drags him around the screen like an arthritic dog. This worthless if artily shot film is a horrifying document of how much Rourke's inner demons had defaced him. The French, apparently, had no problem with this devolved version of Rourke and loved him more than ever. He looked like his head had been sculpted out of wet cat food. He was huge and red, his face looked minced and swollen; his hair had been aggressively re-blonded, and he resembled no one so much as the apocalyptic cartoon character RanXerox.

He was almost wholly unrecognizable. One wonders if Rourke might have been happier if he could have stomached more bad, cartoonish, Hollywood Stallone roles like "Rambo," or Russell Crowe roles that called for more acting, fewer fisticuffs and less sexual boasting.

His magazine portraits now, puckering in thuggy gymwear and stocking cap, suggest that he has become in real life a character much less complex and interesting than most of those he played on-screen.