Actor: Mickey Rourke

I admire many actors like Tommy Lee Jones, Dennis Hopper, Ed Harris, Paul Newman, Charles Bronson, Gene Hackman and the list could go on and on, but one of my favorites would have to be Mickey Rouke. I admire Mickey Rourke for his acting ability and the way he could really get so into the roles and make us feel the way he was feeling in the movie. Like in “Rumble Fish“, he could make us feel his sad and loneliness and detachment, like he was being himself on the screen. I admire him for always being himself, I read a biography about Mickey and he was always true to himself even though more often than not it got him into trouble. “To thine own self be true,” Shakespeare once said and for better or worse Mickey Rourke has been. We tend to admire people that are like us in a way, and Mickey’s mouth mouth has gotten himself into alot of trouble and I guess for better or worse my having a big mouth has ruined alot of opportunites for me as well so I guess I sort of understood what he went through with all those wasted oppotunities over almost nothing. Still he was always true to himself and to boxing. Mickey has made some amazing movies in his career, such as “Diner”, “Pope of Greenwich Village” but he slowly dropped out of the spotlight and started making movies that were not as good and didn’t have the same feel to them like “Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man” with Don Johnson. He was too true to himself and was out of the movies almost completely in the 90’s. He was a shell of himself but then came the movie that changed it all again for the better, “the Wrestler”. This movie was Mickey’s Hollywood Journey about a wrestler that had it  all and then didn’t have it anymore and was working some dead end job wrestling on the weekends. It won him acclaim and the story that is his life continues. Mickey made his life more difficult because he was true to himself but on the other hand he made it far more interesting. Here is his interview with James Lipton for the show “Inside the Actors Studio”, I chose to add the part where he talks about how important his brother was to him.