![]() ![]() I’ve tried to pretend that being a short guy didn’t matter. “I didn’t ask to be short,” Rooney complained. ![]() Gardner was 5ft 6in, while Rooney was said to be 5ft 2in. “You know, Mick, I’m goddamned tired of living with a midget,” she said, and left. While he was at the track or on the golf course, she sat at home. But they soon found out they had little in common. Their combined youthful exuberance was amply displayed in several lively musicals such as Babes in Arms (1939), Strike Up the Band (1940) and Girl Crazy (1943), in all of which Rooney sang, danced, played musical instruments, did imitations and handled comic and emotional scenes with equal aplomb.ĭespite Mayer’s objections, Rooney married Ava Gardner, a new MGM contract player, whom he met when she visited the set of Babes on Broadway (1941). Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry in 1937 launched Mickey and Judy Garland as one of Hollywood’s great teams. You’re a symbol.”īesides appearing in other examples of warm-hearted Americana such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939), Young Tom Edison (1940) and The Human Comedy (1943), he was allowed to play a juvenile delinquent reformed by a priest (Spencer Tracy) in Boys Town (1938). “I don’t care what you do off camera,” he told Rooney, “just don’t do it in public. Off screen, Rooney was busily chasing women, and was seen at nightclubs with them, something Louis B Mayer objected to strenuously. Although the indefatigable Andy was continually getting into scrapes, he respected his father (Lewis Stone), with whom he was always having man-to-man talks. It was the first of 15 vastly popular Hardy Family films – idealised, over-sentimental views of American life, but wonderfully entertaining. In 1937, in a modest comedy called A Family Affair, Rooney played Andy Hardy, a small town judge’s son. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/MGM Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/MGM With Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet. (He was to take the lead in the splendid musical version, Summer Holiday, in 1948.) Mostly, however, Rooney played tough, working-class boys, opposed to prissy, patrician Freddie Bartholomew in Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936), The Devil is a Sissy (1936) and Captains Courageous (1937). and revealed a greater comprehension of his role than almost anyone in the cast”.īack at MGM, he was the kid brother in Ah Wilderness! (1935), based on Eugene O’Neill’s play. The New York Times declared his Puck had “an elfin quicksilver grace. Previously, Rooney had appeared in the Reinhardt stage production in the Hollywood Bowl for a month. However, he made his first real impact when loaned out to Warner Brothers, where he was a delightful Puck in Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle's all-star A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), although he broke a leg tobogganing during shooting and had to be wheeled around on a bicycle by concealed stagehands. He became Mickey Rooney in 1932 when he started to appear in features at MGM, the studio with which he was to be associated for the next 16 years, beginning by playing a variety of brash kids, including a younger version of Blackie Gallagher (with the adult Blackie played by Clark Gable) in Manhattan Melodrama in 1934, among the 10 pictures he appeared in that year. In his unreliable memoirs, he claimed that Walt Disney named his mouse after him, and that Al Capone cried every time he heard him singing Pal o’ My Cradle Days at a club in Chicago. Soon, he was playing a mischievous child, Mickey McGuire, in a series of two-reel comedies, and legally changed his name to that of the character. ![]() In his first feature, Orchids and Ermine (1927), he played another cigar-smoking dwarf, who makes a pass at Colleen Moore. There he made his film debut, aged five, as a dwarf pretending to be a child in a short called Not to Be Trusted (1926), in which he had to puff on a cigar. When his parents separated in 1924, he and his mother took off, in a Model T Ford, for Hollywood. His father, Joseph Yule (known as "Red" Yule), and mother, Nell Carter, were in vaudeville, and Joe Yule Jr, born in Brooklyn, New York, first appeared on stage as part of the family act at the age of 17 months, playing a mouth organ. ![]()
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