Whatever happened to Mickey Rourke?

I first noticed Mickey Rourke in a small role as an arsonist in "Body Heat." He reminded me of Christopher Walken, an actor who seems to have everything under control but you just now he's capable of bursting out at any moment. He was in films I saw before he appeared in "Body Heat," namely "1941" and "Heaven's Gate," but I can't recall him in those movies.

After "Body Heat," he had a memorable role in "Diner," and then as Matt Dillon's older brother in "Rumble Fish." He worked himself up to leading roles in such films as "The Pope of Greenwich Village," the awful "9 1/2 Weeks," "Barfly" and "Angel Heart." However, he started getting the reputation as an actor difficult to work with (director Alan Parker called him "very dangerous on the set") and one who turned down too many good parts. In 1991, he decided to give up acting and return to his original profession, a boxer. That didn't turn out so well, so he came back to acting, struggling in a series of smaller roles (although he turned down the role Bruce Willis eventually took in "Pulp Fiction") until he regained some attention in 2005 for "Sin City." At the time he said he thought his best work was yet to come.

He may have been right. Former Dallas Morning News Film Critic Philip Wuntch (the finest film writer Dallas has ever seen) first tipped me off to Rourke's performance in film called "The Wrestler," after I published on here the results of my first Oscar poll of the year. Wuntch expressed surprised that Rourke's name had not been mentioned among leading Oscar contenders. Since then, "The Wrestler" has played at the Toronto Film Festival and among those gushing are Roger Ebert who calls it arguably Rourke's best career performance and says the film is "drawing turn-away crowds.

Perhaps the reason Rourke's name had not been mentioned in my Oscar poll is because the film did not even have a U.S. distributor before it came to Toronto. It does now, however. Fox Searchlight, responsible for last year's "Juno," has picked it up. Last year at Toronto Ebert started the buzz about Ellen Page's performance in "Juno." It will be interesting to see if he can do the same for Rourke.