Mickey Rooney

Mickey Rooney was an icon of American youth and energy who was as prolific in his marriages as he was on screen

Mickey Rooney

Mickey Rooney, the actor, who has died aged 93, was in the Thirties and for much of the Forties the very image of how Americans liked to think of themselves — brash, energetic and eternally young.

As a child star and later a teenager, he epitomised American get-up-and-go, with a cheeky, cocksure arrogance that won him a wide following, especially in the United States. Though he never got an Oscar for his work, in 1938 he shared a special award with Deanna Durbin “for their significant contribution in bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth, and as juvenile players setting a high standard of ability and achievement”. In keeping with their stature, the awards were pint-size Oscars.

GALLERY: Mickey Rooney's life in pictures

• Mickey Rooney in a film still for Not to be Trusted 

Diminutive but pugnacious, Rooney managed to look like an adolescent until well into maturity. He was still playing Andy Hardy, the chirpy judge’s son which was his most famous role, until the late Forties, when he was nearly 30.

Like many young players renowned in their teens, however, Rooney found difficulty in landing suitable adult roles. He continued to work and was prolific into, and beyond, his seventies - at the age of 90 he filmed a cameo for The Muppets (2011). But the parts were seldom challenging and many of his films barely received a cinema release even in America.

He became better known for his private life than for his work. A prodigious earner at the peak of his popularity, he amassed some $12 million but kept none of it. Most of it went in back taxes and to pay alimony to his many wives (he had eight, of whom the first, Ava Gardner, was the best known). By 1962, he was forced to file for bankruptcy.

^{Ava Gardner and Mickey Rooney after their marriage in 1942} 

Drink was also a problem, but one to which the solution appeared in remarkable circumstances. As he recounted it, he was dining in a Los Angeles restaurant when up stepped a heavenly messenger with bright golden hair. “God loves you,” the angel said. From that moment Mickey Rooney was a born-again Christian and mended his ways. None of his fellow diners saw the angel.

Mickey Rooney’s real name was Joe Yule Jr. He was born in Brooklyn on September 23 1920, the son of vaudeville performers Joe Yule and Nell Carter, who divorced when he was seven. He joined the act almost from the cradle and, at the age of only 15 months, appeared on stage as a midget, dressed in a tuxedo and sporting a huge rubber cigar. At six, he was a movie actor, making his screen debut (again as a midget) in Not to Be Trusted (1926).

His real screen career began when his mother saw an advertisement placed by the cartoonist Fontaine Fox, who was looking for a child to impersonate his comic strip character Mickey McGuire. Fox took a shine to the boy and he got the job, appearing in some 80 episodes between 1926 and 1932, when the series was wound up. In fact, he was so closely identified with the part that his mother wanted him to adopt the name Mickey McGuire professionally. Fox refused so he became Mickey Rooney instead.

In his early years Rooney worked for a number of studios and was eventually placed under contract by MGM because David O Selznick thought he would be ideal to play Clark Gable as a boy in the film Manhattan Melodrama (1934). MGM guaranteed him 40 weeks’ work a year but reserved the right to loan him out to other studios.

One such arrangement, with Warner Bros, resulted in the best performance of Rooney’s career, as the mischievous Puck in Max Reinhardt’s 1935 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Barely 15 at the time, he was perfect casting — impish and with a gurgling laugh that might be construed as innocent or knowing; it was hard to tell.

At MGM, his career took off in 1937 when he first played Andy Hardy, son of Lionel Barrymore’s Judge Hardy in A Family Affair. Planned only as a programme filler, based on a minor Broadway play, it became an unexpected hit and exhibitors begged MGM for a sequel. In the end, the series ran to 15 episodes over the next 10 years, with one ill-judged afterthought in 1958, Andy Hardy Comes Home. Lewis Stone replaced Barrymore as the judge after the first film.

^{Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Strike up the Band} 

Rooney appeared in much else besides, often opposite the equally youthful Judy Garland. In such films as Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (1937); Babes in Arms (1939); Strike Up the Band (1940); Babes on Broadway (1942); and several of the Andy Hardy series, they became the most popular team in movies. He also played a juvenile delinquent opposite Spencer Tracy’s priest in Boys’ Town (1938), and its 1941 sequel Men of Boys’ Town and took the title role in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939).

The success of these films and especially of the Andy Hardy pictures was good for Rooney’s image but bad for his ego. Increasingly bumptious and swollen-headed, he was the only actor on record to have come to blows with MGM’s feared studio boss Louis B Mayer. Rooney wanted the rights to do the Andy Hardy series on radio as well and lost his temper when Mayer said no. Rooney got a hike in salary out of the fracas, but Andy Hardy was never broadcast.

During the war, Rooney served in the Jeep Theatre, entertaining more than two millin troops, but was unable to recover his popularity in peacetime. Summer Holiday (1948), a musical version of Ah Wilderness!, proved a dismal failure, while nobody had anything good to say of Words and Music (also 1948), in which he played lyricist Lorenz Hart to Tom Drake’s Richard Rodgers. What attracted particular criticism was that the script ignored Hart’s homosexuality, portraying him as a red-blooded American male.

^{Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Babes in Arms}

Rooney’s subsequent film career was mostly a catalogue of further disappointments. Especially regrettable was his bucktoothed Japanese photographer in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and his contribution to Stanley Kramer’s leaden comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963).

Against these and many equally as bad, can be set only occasional high points, such as Baby Face Nelson (1957), in which he was cast against type as a Tommy gun-wielding gangster; Pulp (1972), again as a gangster, this time inviting Michael Caine to write his memoirs, and The Black Stallion (1979), for which he received an Academy Award nomination (but did not win) in his supporting role as a horse trainer.

In 1983 he was presented with a second Oscar honouring his lifetime’s work. By the end of his career he had appeared in several hundred films.

He enjoyed a big stage hit in 1979 with a nostalgic tribute to vaudeville called Sugar Babies opposite the dancer Ann Miller. It ran for five years on and off Broadway but failed to translate successfully to London.

In 2003 Rooney and his eighth wife Jan Chamberlin began an association with Rainbow Puppet Productions, providing voices for some of the company’s films. Four years later, in 2007, Rooney made a debut in British pantomime as Baron Hardup in Cinderella at the Sunderland Empire, a role he reprised in the subsequent two years at Bristol and Milton Keynes.

In 2011, as well as his role in The Muppets, he appeared in an episode of Celebrity Ghost Stories, recalling how his dead father had appeared to him one night at a low point in his career telling him not to give up.

Rooney published two volumes of autobiography, of which the second, Life Is Too Short (1992), was conspicuously ungallant about such former movie queens as Norma Shearer and Betty Grable.

Mickey Rooney married, first, Ava Gardner; secondly Betty Jane Rase; thirdly Martha Vickers; fourthly Elaine Mahnken (all the marriages were dissolved). He married, fifthly, Barbara Thomason (who was shot dead by her lover in what may have been a double suicide pact); sixthly Margie Lang; seventhly Carolyn Hockett (both dissolved); and eighthly Jan Chamberlin, who survives him. He had seven children.

Mickey Rooney, born September 23 1920, died April 6 2014

Sue Townsend

Sue Townsend was the writer whose diaries of spotty teenager Adrian Mole became a publishing sensation

Sue Townsend

Sue Townsend, who has died aged 68, was the creator of Adrian Mole, the spotty, lovestruck teenager from Ashby-de-la-Zouch whose comic chronicles of myriad anxieties – political, intellectual, social, sexual – proved the publishing phenomenon of the 1980s and were turned into successful television series, starring Gian Sammarco as the title character.

Including various omnibuses, there were eventually nine volumes of Mole’s diaries; the last – The Prostate Years, published in 2009 – documented him battling cancer as a middle-aged man who runs a bookshop. But it was the early books that particularly gripped the reading public, selling millions of copies and transforming Sue Townsend, a self-confessed “Old Labour type”, from a poverty-stricken single mother-of-three into a rich woman.

^{Sue Townsend's 'The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4'}

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, as the first volume was titled on publication in 1982, unveiled a boy clear-eyed enough to assess the world around him but powerless to shape his own fate. His pursuit of the treacle-haired, middle-class Pandora is defeated by acne, and his self-declared intellectual inclinations by the fact that “I am not very clever”. His slight teenaged frame carried a large dollop of guilt about the state of the nation itself.

While The Secret Diary was devoured by teenagers looking for fiction that accurately reflected their own experiences, Adrian Mole was also a sufficiently convincing Everyman to appeal to other generations too. On the canvas that he provided, Sue Townsend was able to paint a satirical portrait of the day. Mole, she admitted, “is me. He is all of us, to a greater or lesser degree.”

Susan Lillian Townsend was born on April 2 1946 in Leicester, the eldest child in a working-class family. Her father worked in a factory making jet engines before becoming a postman; her mother was a housewife who also worked in the factory canteen. They were, Sue Townsend later said, “very clever” but “idiosyncratic”, and she did not learn to read until she was eight.

No scholar, Sue failed her 11-plus and left South Wigston High School at 15. But, belatedly, the internal, secret world of books increasingly played a central part in her existence. Having started on Richmal Crompton’s Just William, she quickly graduated to Jane Eyre, and from there to Dostoevsky. “Jane Eyre was the first book I read right through, non-stop,” she said. “It was winter, freezing cold, and I remember seeing this thin light outside and realising it was dawn. I got dressed reading, walked to school reading and finished it in the cloakroom at lunchtime. It was riveting.”

She devoured “all the Russians, then the French, then the Americans. I remember getting in trouble for reading The Grapes of Wrath under my desk in a boring lesson.” Yet her going to university “wasn’t even considered. You went into shoes or hosiery.”

She took on a series of unskilled jobs – on a garage forecourt, in a café making “tropical coffees” – and, at 18, married a sheet-metal worker. By the time she was in her early twenties she had three small children.

Life was hard. “Poverty grinds you down – it just pins you to a certain location,” she said. “There’s no movement – no freedom to move. Being poor with three small children is terrifying. You can’t make any plans. You know you’re not going on holiday, ever. There’s no way you could ever afford driving lessons or a car. And the guilt I used to feel: they had holes in their shoes and at one point I had to send them to school wearing Wellingtons when the sun was shining.”

^{Sue Townsend}

But to the secret world of books she added, in the small hours of the night when the children were asleep, the secret world of writing. Her efforts accumulated in an empty box under the stairs: “I knew I wasn’t good enough. When you’re reading Updike, how can you be?” But whatever voice, whatever genre, she tried, the results always tended to the comic.

She was 25 when her husband left her, having belatedly discovered the hippie movement. Slaving away to make ends meet, she took on several jobs, one of them helping to run adventure courses for children. On a canoeing course she met Colin Broadway, who would become her second husband.

Her writing began to emerge from the shadows in 1978, when she joined the Writers’ Group at Leicester’s Phoenix Arts Centre. There she produced a play, Womberang, which won her a Thames TV bursary. (There would be several other stage plays, including Bazaar and Rummage (1982) and, in 1989, Disneyland It Ain’t.) It was one Sunday around this period when the character of Adrian Mole “descended” fully formed into her head.

“I was living in a council house at the time,” she recalled, “on my own with three kids and three part-time jobs to keep us going. So Sunday was a total collapse; I was exhausted. My eldest son said: 'Why can’t we go to safari parks like other families do?’” It was she, said, “that adolescent, self-pitying voice. Mole’s voice. I just heard it.”

Sue Townsend set out to capture the claustrophobia that teenagers feel in the family home, “a brooding and seething: you feel it coming through the floorboards”. Mole’s first incarnation was as Nigel, but Nigel Mole was too similar to another fictional schoolboy, Nigel Molesworth. So she changed the name to Adrian and sent a radio play to John Tydeman, head of drama for Radio 4. Broadcast in January 1982, it was a huge popular success and led to a book contract. Nine months later The Secret Diary was published, and within a month it was top of the bestseller lists; within a year it had sold a million copies.

^{Gian Sammarco as Adrian Mole}

Her books were adapted into three television series, The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ and The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole ( Thames Television, both starring Gian Sammarco, 1985-87) and Adrian Mole: the Cappuccino Years (starring Stephen Mangan, BBC One, 2001). The fame and fortune Adrian Mole brought Sue Townsend ultimately allowed her to escape the poverty of her early years. She even bought the pretty Victorian vicarage to which, in her days as a struggling young mother, she had come to pay rent to her landlord.

But she was not able to enjoy her new, comfortable existence for long. In the mid-1980s, when she was still in her 30s, she suffered a heart attack, the first dramatic sign of the debilitating diabetes that would afflict her for the rest of her life. That ill health was compounded, in her last decade and more, by Charcot’s joint – degenerative arthritis, which meant she could not move far without a wheelchair.

She was, by her own admission, “the world’s worst diabetic”, finding the disease hard to manage. Worst of all, however, was the loss of her sight. For someone as passionate about books as Sue Townsend, it was a heavy blow. “Learning to be blind is incredibly hard work,” she told The Observer in 2001. “In my sleep I had a haemorrhage in both eyes and when I woke my eyes were full of this black haze, like thick black smoke. I thought there was a fire. I staggered around, trying to put it out. It wasn’t on the stove, so I thought it was upstairs, and of course I took the black smoke with me, looking for it. It was inside my head. Oh God. So I went to the doctor and said: 'Am I utterly blind now?’ And he said to me, 'Yes, you’re quite blind.’ And that was it. All very English. There are no ceremonies for these things.”

She mourned the fact that she would “never see an individual snowdrop again... never see my grandchildren grow and change”. But she remained resolutely upbeat — at least in public, confessing that when it came to bouts of self-pity: “I prefer to do it in private.”

The many interviewers she met recorded the tumbling, throaty laughter that continued to lace her conversation. And the books kept coming too. As well as the periodic arrival of a new volume of Adrian Mole, she wrote six other novels, including The Queen and I (1992), a satire about the Royal family living on a housing estate after a republican uprising. A sequel, Queen Camilla, came out in 2006. Her last book, The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year, was published in 2012. These she completed by dictating, usually to her son Sean, who in 2009 donated to his mother one of his kidneys .

Last year Sue Townsend suffered a stroke. She had plans for a new volume of Adrian Mole, which she hinted, possibly jokingly, might be “about anarchy, with the ensuing rape and pillage”. Social media was another possibility: “He will be blogging and twittering – but in a quite incompetent way.”

As her health continued to deteriorate, however, Sue Townsend realised that she was unlikely to complete a new volume. This did not dispirit her: “I honestly think of [Adrian Mole] as a character living his own life. He’s doing things that I don’t even know about. And he hasn’t told me; I haven’t been to see him for a while.”

Sue Townsend was awarded two honorary doctorates, including one from the University of Leicester, her home town.

She is survived by her husband and four children.

Sue Townsend, born April 2 1946, died April 10 2014

Bob Hoskins

Bob Hoskins was the actor who excelled as the tough but engaging anti-hero of Mona Lisa and The Long Good Friday

Bob Hoskins 

Bob Hoskins, the actor, who has died aged 71, was hailed as the original tough guy of British film, but once described himself as “short, fat and bald, the only actor who had to diet and wear lifts to play Mussolini”.

His cuboid frame, villainous features and Cockney accent fitted him for a series of roles which he described as “animals, thugs and heavies”. These included the gangland boss Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday (1980) and the violent minder George in Mona Lisa (1986), a portrayal that earned him an Oscar nomination. Hoskins won critical success in both films, mainly for his ability to exude menace while suggesting the vulnerability beneath the violent surface of his characters.

Ultimately it was Hoskins’s versatility and eye for a good part that made him a star. He played Arthur Parker in Dennis Potter’s innovative and hugely successful Pennies from Heaven (1978); Nathan Detroit in the National Theatre’s first musical Guys and Dolls (1981); and cameo parts such as the police chief in The Honorary Consul (1983) and Robert de Niro’s plumbing partner in Brazil (1985).

Like his friend Michael Caine, Hoskins was one of the few British actors to become equally successful in Hollywood. Films such as The Cotton Club (1984), Sweet Liberty (1986) and the box office smash Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) consolidated his position as a British actor who could make the transition to the United States. A contributing factor in his American success may have been that Hoskins was one of a small minority of British actors able to produce a convincing American accent.

^{Bob Hoskins in 'The Long Good Friday'} 

Robert William Hoskins was born on October 26 1942 in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, but grew up in Finsbury Park, north London. His father was a clerk for the Pickfords removal firm, his mother a school cook. At Stroud Green secondary modern school, his dyslexia meant that he was often written off as stupid.

During his adolescence, the beatings he endured in street fights toughened him up, and a knife wound across the bridge of his nose left him with a hollow between the eyes. A life in the gangs beckoned — he was once taken to meet the Kray twins who ran London’s underworld in the 1950s — but he dreamed of becoming an actor.

Hoskins had never been formally trained, and was always proud that he had never attended a single acting lesson. Instead, on leaving school in 1959, he took on a series of temporary jobs, including as a merchant seaman in the Norwegian navy, a banana-picker on a kibbutz, camel-herder in Syria and porter at Covent Garden market.

^{Hoskins in 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?'}

In 1969, after an abortive attempt at going into accounting with his father, Hoskins claimed that he “fell sideways into acting by mistake”. While waiting in a pub with a friend who wanted to audition for the Unity Theatre, Hoskins was mistaken for the next candidate. “I was too pissed to argue,” he recalled, “so I got on stage and acted my socks off.” He was offered the lead in The Feather Pluckers, and at the play’s first night was signed up by an agent.

Hoskins spent the next 12 months in repertory, building up a reputation as an actor who was content to do anything, including fire-eating and running headlong at brick walls. “In those days we just passed round the hat,” he recalled. “I had a wife and kid to support on that, and so I wasn’t going to say no to anything that was for the good of the show.”

In 1975 he was offered his first television role, as an illiterate truck driver, in the BBC’s adult literacy programme On the Move. The programme established him as a “screen natural”, and attracted a wide following and an almost cult status. After his television appearance, offers of work on stage and screen doubled. One critic described Hoskins as having “cornered the market in the cheeky Cockney chappie”.

^{Hoskins with Frances Barber in the 2009 drama The Street} 

In 1980 The Long Good Friday established Hoskins as a global star. The film was enormously successful in the US, but Hoskins was angered by the fact that his speeches were dubbed into “stage Cockney”.

“They thought the Yanks wouldn’t be able to understand me”, he complained. “In the film I end up sounding like Dick Van Dyke.”

In 1981 Hoskins starred in the National Theatre’s production of Guys and Dolls. It was the Theatre’s first attempt at a musical and was a major critical and box office success. As in Pennies from Heaven, Hoskins’s charismatic performance carried him over any deficiencies in his singing and dancing. “The choreographer convinced me I looked like Fred Astaire,” he remembered, “but I really looked like a little hippopotamus shaking its hooves.” Critics described Hoskins’s “animal appeal” and “considerable panache”. They began to compare him with Edward G Robinson and George Raft, and to call him “the Cockney Cagney”.

^{Bob Hoskins with Michael Caine and Cathy Tyson in Mona Lisa} 

In 1983 Hoskins was miscast in The Honorary Consul, with Michael Caine, and gave an embarrassing performance as a South American police chief. Despite this setback, however, he received an early morning call from Francis Ford Coppola asking him if he would appear in Coppola’s next film. Hoskins thought it was a joke and shouted down the line: “It’s three o’clock in the morning and you’ve just woken up my kid, you bastard” — before hanging up.

Coppola called back later and signed Hoskins as the nightclub owner in The Cotton Club (1984).

In Heart Condition (1990) Hoskins played a bigoted white policeman kept alive by a heart transplant from a black donor. He went on to make Mermaids (also 1990), a comedy in which he starred opposite Cher . In Hook (1991), a live-action version of Peter Pan with Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams, Hoskins played the fusspot Mr Smee.

Although largely self-educated, Hoskins co-wrote and directed the feature film The Raggedy Rawney (1988), a gipsy story set in central Europe, which was reckoned an ambitious failure and had only a limited distribution. On television he won critical approval for his portrayal of the Italian dictator in Mussolini: the Decline and Fall of Il Duce (1985); while his appearance in The Street in 2009 earned him the accolade of Best Actor at the International Emmy Awards of 2010.

In 2012, after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, Bob Hoskins announced that he was retiring from acting.

He married, in 1970 (dissolved 1978), Jane Livesey, with whom he had a son and daughter. In 1982 he married Linda Banwell, who survives him with their son and daughter, and the children of his first marriage.

Bob Hoskins, born October 26 1942, died April 29 2014