Mickey Rooney

Mickey Rooney, born Ninnian Joseph Yule Jr. on September 23, 1920, in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, was an American actor whose career spanned nearly nine decades and encompassed more than 300 films. The only child of Joe Yule, a Scottish-born vaudevillian who had emigrated from Glasgow, and Nellie W. Carter, a former chorus girl and burlesque performer from Kansas City, Missouri, Rooney came from a performing family. His parents were appearing together in a Brooklyn production of A Gaiety Girl at the time of his birth, and by his own account he began performing at 17 months old as part of their act, wearing a specially tailored tuxedo.

When Rooney was four, his parents separated, and he and his mother relocated to Hollywood. He made his first film appearance at age six in the 1926 short Not to Be Trusted. His mother subsequently spotted an advertisement seeking a child to play the character Mickey McGuire in a series of short films, and Rooney secured the role, appearing in 78 installments of the series between 1927 and 1936, beginning with Mickey's Circus. During this same period he briefly voiced Oswald the Lucky Rabbit for Walter Lantz Productions. At 14, he played Puck in the Warner Bros. all-star adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and at 16 he began portraying Andy Hardy at MGM, a role he would reprise across 16 films through 1958. The Andy Hardy series made Rooney the top box-office attraction in the country from 1939 to 1941 and one of the highest-paid actors of that era. Between the ages of 15 and 25, he appeared in 43 films and became one of MGM's most consistently successful performers.

At 17, Rooney earned his first major recognition playing Whitey Marsh in Boys Town. At 19, he became the first teenager nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, for his performance as Mickey Moran in the 1939 film adaptation of Babes in Arms, and received a special Academy Juvenile Award that same year. He earned a second Best Actor nomination for his role as Homer Macauley in The Human Comedy. During World War II, Rooney was drafted and served nearly two years, entertaining more than two million troops on stage and radio, including performances in combat zones for which he was awarded a Bronze Star.

Returning from military service in 1945, Rooney found himself at 5 feet 2 inches too old for juvenile roles and too short for most adult parts, limiting his access to starring vehicles. Nevertheless, a series of low-budget but critically regarded films through the mid-1950s cast him in lead dramatic roles that were later recognized as films noir. His career gained renewed momentum through well-received supporting performances in The Bold and the Brave (1956), Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962), It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Pete's Dragon (1977), and The Black Stallion (1979). He received Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor for both The Bold and the Brave and The Black Stallion. In 1982, he won both a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy Award for the title role in the television film Bill, and was presented with the Academy Honorary Award that same year.

Rooney's Broadway career extended from 1979 to 1998. He starred in Sugar Babies, the production that brought him to Broadway in the early 1980s and for which he received a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Musical and a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Actor in a Musical, both in 1980. He also starred in the musical The Wizard of Oz and in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and appeared in The Will Rogers Follies. Director Clarence Brown, who worked with Rooney on National Velvet and The Human Comedy, described him as the closest thing to a genius he had ever encountered, while Laurence Olivier called him the best actor there had ever been. Rooney died on April 6, 2014, and was among the last surviving performers from the era of silent film.