Film Studies: Meet the Mick - the horniest, wildest, greatest kid in town

According to the Internet Movie Database, this dynamic force has, so far, appeared in 260 films - the first, Not To Be Trusted, was 1926, and he played a midget; while something called Strike the Tent is now in post-production. In 1939 - the most golden of golden years - he became the top box-office attraction in America, and he received his first Oscar nomination, for Babes in Arms (which is Busby Berkeley, Judy Garland and our guy putting on a show). He had already won an honorary Oscar in 1938: he and Deanna Durbin won miniature statuettes for "bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth". So what has changed?

This man made silent pictures. He was Joe Yule once, on stage at the age of 15 months. What did he do? He did everything. He had done maybe 52 reelers, as "Mickey Maguire" in the years when the rest of us have to deal with education. He is, to this day, uncanny, sexy, beautiful, haunting and closer to the spirit world than anyone has ever come on screen playing Puck in Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935). He was opposite Clark Gable in Manhattan Melodrama, and you could see how the boy and the grown man were kids for ever. He was Andy Hardy, about 15 times, at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer - and he went from being the apple of Louis B Mayer's eye (the son he had never had) to a sex-mad kid, so wild and crazy he disrupted the sentimental image of the Hardy films. What an opening - Rooney as every American bound to fail in the post-war reality. You can see him playing Willy Loman, Stanley Kowalski and Hickey in The Iceman Cometh (all in the same play). Of course, if Mayer had been prescient, he might have looked at Rooney in the early Forties and known that he was the future - Dean and Presley and rock and roll way ahead of his time - as well as the incarnation of American nostalgia, fit to play Young Tom Edison.

So the Mick crashed. He went off to war, just like Hardy. He got drunk and married up a storm - just like Mickey - and he lost all his money. By the mid 1940s, it was said, he was over. His astonishing energy and will to stay young were fighting an older body. And the body lost. He had about a year-and-a-half married to Ava Gardner (years before Sinatra), and he had been married to Martha Vickers (Carmen in The Big Sleep - enough said?).

And then, in the years and decades in which he was officially over, Mickey Rooney did a boxer in Killer McCoy; he was lyricist Larry Hart in Words and Music - if only he could have played that part straight, by which I mean not-straight; a race-car driver in The Big Wheel.

The pictures got smaller, but Mickey got bigger. Sometimes that clash was demented, over-the-top or hardly bearable. He was radioactive in The Atomic Kid; he was a soldier in The Bold and the Brave (a second Oscar nomination); chilling in The Comedian, written by Rod Serling and directed by John Frankenheimer for TV; he was hilarious in Richard Quine's Operation Mad Ball; he was on Death Row in The Last Mile; he was nearly an international incident in Breakfast at Tiffany's; he was in Requiem for a Heavyweight.

Yes, I missed something out: for Don Siegel, in 1957, he was Baby Face Nelson - which was not just being Dean and Presley as well as the Mick, it was also Bonnie and Clyde without Warren Beatty's need to be loved. Baby Face Nelson is one of the greatest performances in cinema - it's as authentic as Falconetti as Joan of Arc and every bit as frightening.

He has never stopped. In the Nineties, he did Sugar Babies on Broadway. In the Eighties, he won an Emmy as Bill, a disabled man. A couple of years ago, driving through Oregon, I saw that he was doing dinner theatre in a clearing in the woods. Plenty of his movies have been unworthy of him. But I recall a year in which a very young son insisted on watching The Black Stallion (1979) over and over again on video, and the son sometimes asked his father why he was crying. It was just because of the unaffected zest and tenderness, the lust for timing and sentiment, with which Mickey Rooney was being Henry, the old trainer, teaching the boy to ride.

For good and ill, Mickey Rooney was what this whole movie thing was about. And in his gargantuan, monstrous need to entertain us he exemplifies the show in the business. Who is not crying?

d.thomson@independent.co.uk