TCM Schedule for Thurs, Dec 5, 2024 - Star of the Month: Mickey Rooney

[Auggie]

Mickey Rooney (born Ninnian Joseph Yule Jr.; other pseudonym Mickey Maguire; September 23, 1920 – April 6, 2014) was an American actor.

In a career spanning nearly nine decades, he appeared in more than 300 films and was among the last surviving stars of the silent-film era. He was the top box-office attraction from 1939 to 1941, and one of the best-paid actors of that era. At the height of a career marked by declines and comebacks, Rooney performed the role of Andy Hardy in a series of 16 films in the 1930s and 1940s that epitomized the mainstream United States self-image.

At the peak of his career between ages 15 and 25, he made 43 films, and was one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's most consistently successful actors. A versatile performer, he became a celebrated character actor later in his career. Laurence Olivier once said he considered Rooney "the best there has ever been." Clarence Brown, who directed him in two of his earliest dramatic roles in National Velvet and The Human Comedy, said Rooney was "the closest thing to a genius" with whom he had ever worked. He won a Golden Globe Award in 1982 and an Emmy Award in the same year for the title role in a television movie Bill and was awarded the Academy Honorary Award in 1982.

Rooney first performed in vaudeville as a child actor, and made his film debut at the age of six. He played the title character in the "Mickey McGuire" series of 78 short films, from age seven to 13. At 14 and 15, he played Puck in the play and subsequent film adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

At the age of 16, he began playing Andy Hardy, and gained his first recognition at 17 as Whitey Marsh in Boys Town. At only 19, Rooney became the second-youngest Best Actor in a Leading Role nominee and the first teenager to be nominated for an Academy Award for his performance as Mickey Moran in 1939 film adaptation of coming-of-age Broadway musical Babes in Arms; he was awarded a special Academy Juvenile Award in 1939. Rooney received his second Academy Award nomination in the same category for his role as Homer Macauley in The Human Comedy.

His mother was an American former chorus girl and burlesque performer from Kansas City, Missouri, while his father was a Scottish-born vaudevillian, who had emigrated to New York from Glasgow with his family at the age of three months. When Rooney was born, his parents were appearing together in a Brooklyn production of A Gaiety Girl. He later recounted in his memoirs that he began performing at the age of 17 months as part of his parents' routine, wearing a specially tailored tuxedo.

Much more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Rooney



Rooney with Judy Garland in Love Finds Andy Hardy, airing later this month.


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Alternate synopses, full cast, and trivia for all films available at https://www.imdb.com


--- DAYTIME (EST) ---

6:00 AM | The Beast of the City (1932)
A police captain leads the fight against a vicious gangland chief.
Dir: Charles Brabin | Cast: Walter Huston, Jean Harlow, Wallace Ford

7:30 AM | Broadway to Hollywood (1933)
Three generations of vaudevillians fight for stardom on stage and screen.
Dir: Willard Mack | Cast: Alice Brady, Frank Morgan, Jackie Cooper

9:00 AM | The Chief (1933)
A fireman's son goes into politics.
Dir: Charles F. Riesner | Cast: Ed Wynn, Charles "Chic" Sale, Dorothy Mackaill

10:15 AM | The Life of Jimmy Dolan (1933)
A boxer facing a murder charge finds refuge in a children's home.
Dir: Archie Mayo | Cast: Douglas Fairbanks, Loretta Young, Aline MacMahon

12:00 PM | Death on the Diamond (1934)
A rookie pitcher tries to stop someone from killing the St. Louis Cardinals.
Dir: Edward Sedgwick | Cast: Robert Young, Madge Evans, Nat Pendleton

1:30 PM | Hide-Out (1934)
Farmers take in an injured racketeer and try to reform him.
Dir: W. S. Van Dyke | Cast: Robert Montgomery, Maureen O'Sullivan, Edward Arnold

3:00 PM | Manhattan Melodrama (1934)
Boyhood friends grow up on opposite sides of the law.
Dir: W. S. Van Dyke | Cast: Clark Gable, William Powell, Myrna Loy

5:00 PM | Down the Stretch (1936)
A disgraced jockey's son fights to clear the family name.
Dir: William Clemens | Cast: Patricia Ellis, Mickey Rooney, Dennis Moore

6:15 PM | Riffraff (1936)
Young marrieds in the fishing business run afoul of the law.
Dir: J. Walter Ruben | Cast: Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy, Una Merkel


--- PRIME TIME, LATE NIGHT, SATURDAY MORNING ---

8:00 PM | A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
Shakespeare's classic about two pairs of lovers and an amateur actor who get mixed up with fairies.
Dir: Max Reinhardt | Cast: Ian Hunter, Verree Teasdale, Hobart Cavanaugh

10:30 PM | The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939)
To avoid an abusive father, a rambunctious boy rafts the Mississippi River with a slave, encountering many characters.
Dir: Richard Thorpe | Cast: Mickey Rooney, Walter Connolly, William Frawley

12:15 AM | Ah, Wilderness! (1935)
In his only comedy, Eugene O'Neill captures the trials of growing up in small-town America.
Dir: Clarence Brown | Cast: Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore, Aline MacMahon

2:00 AM | Stablemates (1938)
A broken down veterinarian saves a stable boy's prize racehorse.
Dir: Sam Wood | Cast: Wallace Beery, Mickey Rooney, Arthur Hohl

3:45 AM | Lord Jeff (1938)
When a good boy goes bad, his family sends him to a naval military school.
Dir: Sam Wood | Cast: Freddie Bartholomew, Mickey Rooney, Charles Coburn

5:15 AM | The Devil Is a Sissy (1936)
A British boy in New York tries to join a tenement gang.
Dir: W. S. Van Dyke | Cast: Freddie Bartholomew, Jackie Cooper, Mickey Rooney