He was also in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World with Buster Keaton (with Buster in a “blink and you’ll miss it” cameo).
Yeah - who, really, is left? Reading his New York Times obituary that mentioned all the stars he worked with the only two living names I recognized were Olivia de Havilland and Carol Channing.
Rooney was great in “The Clown,” the live teleplay from the '50s written by Rod Serling. Highly recommended.
RIP. But, he was not dead already?
Kirk Douglas is still alive.
When this news first started popping up on my feed, I misread it as Mickey Rourke. That was actually less surprising than the truth. Rooney just seemed like the kind of guy who was going to make 100, while Rourke is a death-by-misadventure waiting to happen.
I saw him and a wife (I think his latest) when he came to my campus in college.
It was interesting to see someone who lived such a long life in the cinemas, dating back to original vaudeville.
Interesting that we lost Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney within just a few months of each other.
In good news, now Judy Garland will finally have someone to put on shows in the old barn with again.
Another example of child stardom messing someone up in a continuing way. One article I read mentioned that back in their vaudeville days, his parents evaded child-welfare authorities by passing off him off as a midget.
My favorite Mickey Rooney clip:
A Hollywood classic! :oWhen I told my husband about this, he asked, “Wasn’t he ninety million years old?”
I said, “No, he’d been married ninety million times.”
Was he the one in blackface?
Here’s one of my favorites.
Didn’t Jay Leno have him sitting in the audience for one of the last (if not the last) show?
I thought he was a midget.
Which is a lovely extension of his role as the jockey/trainer in the second best horse-racing movie ever made (after the Ballard masterpiece), National Velvet 34 years earlier.
His first Oscar-winning movie was Manhattan Melodrama in 1934, his last was The Muppets in 2011–a 77-year span and a record unlikely to be beaten anytime soon.
He was also a damn good Puck.
RIP.
Hmmm. It’s interesting that the women went for a more realistic “blackface”. I wonder if that was standard.
Either way, we really need more young actors doing blackface today. It would save so many young black actor from having to work stereotypical jobs. Plus, when the country had blackface, it didn’t have all this problem with global warming.
I could never understand how he attracted such beautiful women. The guy either had an unmatched line of bullshit or a 12" dick. Maybe both. Of course, for awhile there he was a very rich man with a lot of Hollywood influence, so there’s that.
The women have to be “light” black to still be attractive to the male members of the audience, I will venture.
For just a moment, though, I thought the second female singer was Lena Horne.
Hard to believe he died, I thought he was going to outlast everyone. Are there any other stars that had kept working from the 20s on to today? (I know he wasn’t a star until the 30s). I mean who else could refer to Betty White as a newcomer?
Baby Peggy is still alive, though she has been out of the business for a few generations.