UNFLATTERING plastic surgery takes its toll as one-time heartthrob Mickey
Rourke shocks his fans with his latest bizarre look.
He was once
hailed as the next Marlon Brando.
But unflattering plastic
surgery has destroyed the baby face of the former heartthrob who set pulses
racing in steamy films such as 9½ Weeks, Body Heat and Angel Heart.
The
latest photo of Mickey Rourke shows a 65-year-old so distorted by the
surgeon’s knife that he looks like a computergenerated image.
Strolling in Los Angeles this week with his hairdresser friend
Giuseppe Franco, the actor was unrecognisable.
Sporting
suspicious silver hair and clothes more suited to a man at least four
decades younger, his face was a peculiar mash-up – eyes out of alignment,
sunken rubbery cheeks and pumped-up lips.
n the 1980s Mickey
Rourke was the quintessential bad boy.
He was sultry, he was
naughty and women loved him – but then he became more interested in brawling
than box office and his good looks took a beating.
Rourke had
been a keen amateur boxer before he became an actor but returned to the ring
as a professional in the early 1990s. During the next five years he was
undefeated in eight fights but frequent punches to the face led him to seek
surgery.
Rourke, the son of a professional body builder, claims that
most of his operations were performed to fix prior injuries.
“Most
of it was to mend the mess of my face, but I went to the wrong guy to put my
face back together,” he once said.
“I had my nose broken twice. I
had five operations on my nose and one on a smashed cheekbone,” Rourke
added.
“I had to have cartilage taken from my ear to rebuild my nose and a
couple of operations to scrape out the cartilage because the scar tissue
wasn’t healing properly.”
Experts say he has also had a facelift,
eyelid surgery to both upper and lower lids, soft tissue fillers, cheek and
chin implants.
But there is some debate over whether the
procedures are reconstructive or cosmetic.
In 1996 Rourke’s
spokesperson said rhinoplasty (a nose job) was necessary because the actor,
who’d retired from the ring, was having diffi culty breathing.
“A boxing injury can cause severe breathing problems,” says Dr
Anthony Griffin, a plastic surgeon who appeared on E! TV’s 20 Best And Worst
Plastic Surgery Countdown – a programme in which Rourke appeared at number
15.
“The most delicate bony structure in the body is the nose, so
it’s very vulnerable.”
Three years later Rourke’s plastic surgeon
said he needed to fix “callus formations” in his cheekbones, areas of
toughened skin apparently caused by boxing.
Cheek implants were prescribed but were they necessary?
“I
would disagree that because he was a boxer he needed cheek implants,” says
Dr Griffin.
“I think just the opposite.”
With six
films due out by the end of next year, Rourke’s roles are now a world away
from the erotic backlist that made the actor famous.
These days
he plays misfi ts and villains, character roles suggested by the visible
results of 20 years spent keeping the plastic surgeons of America’s West
Coast busy.
His role in the 1998 film Buffalo 66, in which he played an
intimidating bookie, marked the beginning of a string of character roles and
by then he had the haunting face to match his new genre.
By 2000
his lips were several sizes larger and his face began to take on the
unnatural plasticised sheen of “work”.
Three years later his eyes
– always a compelling feature – had lost their prominence amidst scar
tissue.
To ready him for his portrayal as a haunted comic book
hero brought to life in the 2005 movie Sin City, Rourke underwent three
hours of make-up every day.
While his performance won plaudits,
cruel critics pointed out that he was perfectly cast because he already
looked like a cartoon character – even before the make-up was applied.
Rourke
followed up this star turn with The Wrestler for which he won best actor at
the Golden Globes in 2009.
It was a role that fully exploited the gruesome real-life
appearance that he continues to try to fix.
Last month the actor
had yet another nose job.
He posted a photograph on Instagram in
which he was wearing a bandage and shaking hands with his plastic
surgeon.
“Now I am pretty again,” he wrote.
The actor’s fans have
been less than impressed.
“Mickey Rourke is a goddamn idiot,”
said one on social media.
“Does he even know how many of us men
would have died to get such looks that he had in the 1980s. Damn.”
Dr Griffin believes that Rourke is “one of those sad cases
where they took a perfectly handsome looking movie star and distorted his
features”.
Being defined by your looks is one thing but being
defined by cosmetic surgery and a shortlived boxing career is quite
another.
