Mickey Rooney Keeps Busy
"Retire? Why? Why is it everyone wants me to retire? Who cares about age? I don’t need to retire."
That’s Mickey Rooney, 87, voted by film exhibitors the top box-office star in the United States for three years in a row, 1939–1941.
Why such an enormous success? Well, pictures like Babes in Arms (opposite Judy Garland, and for which he received a best actor Oscar nomination), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Strike Up the Band (also with Garland), and, ahem, Life Begins for Andy Hardy.
Love him or hate him, one must admit that Rooney has lots of stamina, having been putting on a show since the late 1920s. According to Robert C. Lopez’s Greensboro News & Record article on Rooney, the veteran performer "keeps in shape by cutting the rug onstage, and Greensboro fans can catch his song-and-dance routine when he and wife Jan Chamberlin hit the Carolina Theatre on Saturday."
Lopez adds, "during his heyday, stars — especially child stars — were held to a strict code of behavior in public. Today’s young stars — like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan — seem more likely to make headlines for run-ins with the law and exposing themselves. Rooney, who admits he had a reputation as a troublemaker in his youth, said he has nothing but sympathy for such troubled performers.
"’I really don’t care to comment on them, other than to say we feel very sorry for them,’ he said. ‘We’re all human beings, nobody’s perfect.’"
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I’ve never been a Mickey Rooney fan, but I have to say that I admire his hard work.
I WOULD GIVE SO MUCH TO SEE
MICKEY ROONEY PERFORM LIVE.
I am so greatful to him for
the joy he has give me my
family and all my friends.
He is a fabulous talent, actor, singer
dancer, but he is so sincere.