Rourke and writer and co- director. Frank Miller in a cameo role as a priest
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This being Rourke. he still likes to do things differently. While Sin City‘s impressive roster of talent (Clive Owen. Benicio Del Toro. Jessica Alba and Brittany Murphy) are all subjected to a
gruelling round of publicity interviews. Rourke is doing a lighter schedule. He‘s wearing a yellow shirt. checked jacket and dark sunglasses — to hide the effects of the after-show party from the night before — and his voice is like gravel from years of nicotine abuse. Now 48. he no longer has the James Dean-like looks that shot him to fatne. .\'ot unlike Marv. Rourke’s features are puffy and swollen. With skin like tanned leather. his face is etched with regret as tnuch as anything. Rourke is. after all. the classic Hollywood tragedy. Propelled to worldwide fame in the 1980s with films like Dine/z Rumble [is/1 and the erotic fantasy 9n: ll’eeks. he gave it all tip when he was 34 to slip on the boxing gloves. It was no surprise. ()n 1987’s Angel Heart. Alan Parker compared him and fellow Method-inspired co- star Robert I)e .\'iro to ‘two prize-fighters' circling each other. Rourke was born into brutality. Raised in Miami by his mother. he describes his stepfather as 'nasty and real violent‘. liighting out of Miami Beach's l‘ifth Street (iym. he knocked tip a pretty good amateur record and never lost his love for the noble art. Yet turning pro just as his career went into frcefall with films like ll'i/rl ()I‘t'lll(l changed him. as if the pummelling was a penance of a sort. ‘I guess he got all that aggression out of
him from all that boxing and now he‘s really meek. like '/.en. like Buddah.’ says John Leguiziamo. who co-starred with him in Jonas
.. Akerlund’s Spun. ()thers — notably Otis. who accused him of
spousal abuse after the couple‘s six year marriage ended in divorce in 1998 — might disagree. What does Rourke think'.’ ‘Change is very difficult.‘ he grunts. but sometimes change is needed if you are going to survive. Change is hard. but I sort of look forward to it.’ He gave up boxing on the advice of doctors. after he failed a neurological test. ‘You think: one more light. just one more fight] he says. ‘I begged my doctors . . . l was three fights away from doing a title fight and they said. “Mickey. you won‘t be able to count the money.”
In repentant mood. Rourke says he has also learnt to not bad-mouth his co-stars. ‘I just don‘t want to make the same mistakes I made my whole life.’ he says. ‘I fucked tip big time and. you know. I‘ve been paying the price for it. paying the piper. lfl could say it wasn't my fault and I blame all these pricks out there. I could live with myself. But the fact was it was my fault and it was my anger and stuff I couldn‘t get over from a long time ago. I tried to make everybody else pay for it and in the end I dug a deep. dark hole for myself.’
If he no longer has the boxing to dispel his zngl'Csslolt. he at least has Sin City to let out his
violent side. With the non—inflected backdrops
‘I FUCKED UP BIG TIME AND I'VE BEEN PAYING THE PRICE FOR IT'
from Miller‘s book faithfully recreated for the big screen. it is little wonder Rourke says the film is ‘like a comic book coming to life‘. He admits he finds the rather excessive sadism of the film funny. ‘You don’t look at it like some Scorsese movie. like Mean Streets or something.‘ he says. ‘I think Robert [Rodriguez] is the furthest thing from a violent man that I've ever met. I don‘t think he understands that real world at all. the way that I do. So his violence comes across like the kind of violence a kid could watch when they are watching a cattoon.‘
Having recently teased us with flashes of his brilliance — the transvestite inmate in Steve Buscemi‘s xtm'mu/ l'ilt'lUt')‘. a bereaved father in Sean Penn‘s The Pledge and a crystal meth dealer in Spun Rourke’s career redemption. at least. now seems complete. He recently shot Tony Scott’s /)()Hllll(). which co-stars Keira Knightley as a true-life bounty hunter. ‘Keira
was a fucking terrific girl to work with.‘ he says. ‘I don't particularly like actresses. but I loved her. she was a real champ. a real professional.‘ With that. he offers a huge paw to be shook and sprawls back on the sofa. He looks content for a fleeting second. The Hollywood outlaw is back.
Sin City opens on Fri 3 Jun.
Hollywood has long been home to rebels, sluts and losers - Mickey Rourke hails from this tradition of head cases. Here are five other shaky-handed torchbearers. Clara Bow Hollywood's original 'It' girl, Bow
' t r was a huge silent movie star. but she was born in Brooklyn in poverty. Her mother tried to slit 5 her throat when she announced \’ she was going to enter the film i ' industry. Bow's promiscuity was legendary: she once gangbanged the entire University of Southern California football team and she included Eddie Cantor. Gary Cooper and Bela Lugosi among her other conquests. Mental illness. debt, mic fright (with the coming of the talkies) and problems with her embezzling secretary Daisy de Voe finally got the better of her and she retired from acting at the age of 26 to marry cowboy and actor Rex Bell. Lionel Stander Gravel-voiced Stander was one of the most defiant Hollywood actors when faced with McCarthy's House of Un-American Activities Committee. He was a proud Marxist and activist in 508 America. After getting blacklisted. he became a successful Wall Street broker. later starred in European films. and still later returned to American prominence as the chauffeur in Hart to Hart. one of the top ten TV programmes during the early 808. Charles Bukowski Ever the outsider. poet and writer Bukowski flirted with stardom in Hollywood in the late 80s when he moved there to work on the screenplay for Barbet Schroeder's Barf/y. From day one Bukowski refused to play .. .. the celebrity game and turned down invitations to appear on chat shows. preferring to drink in dive bars in the valley. Bukowski later returned to live in the outskirts of LA. where he wrote an account of his time in Hollywood. It remains one of the few Bukowski books to have been optioned by a studio at some point.
Sam Fuller Ex-journalist and Q freewheelin‘ cult filmmaker Fuller hated Hollywood with a passion and refused nearly every chance to work on any part of any of his films there. Woody Harrelson One of the few sitcom actors to make the successful jump to movies. This boy from Midland. Texas is very . outspoken ab0ut his dislike of
the Hollywood machine. It is very telling that Harrelson now dedicates as much of his time to hemp activism and environmental duties as he does on film acting.
2o May—El .lt." :2i1t153THE LIST 25