Happy Birthday, Mickey Rooney

Happy Birthday, Mickey Rooney (September 23, 1920 - April 6, 2014) Rooney was perhaps best known for his films of the 1930s and 1940s, including the Andy Hardy series and his collaborations with Judy Garland. Nearly all of Rooney’s life was spent in show business. Laurence Olivier called him “the greatest actor of them all.” He was nominated for four Academy Awards and five Emmys (winning one). After he passed away in 2014, Vanity Fair dubbed Rooney - married eight times with a career that went up and down after World War II - “the original Hollywood train wreck.” While his personal travails may have overshadowed his work for much of his life, Mickey Rooney’s performances are still celebrated. Rooney made three visits to Suspense, and I’ve featured all of them on Stars on Suspense: In “The Lie,” Rooney plays a young man freshly expelled from another college who returns home to find his stepmother dead. He plans to take the fall to save his father, who he suspects to be the killer (4/28/1949). Then in “For Love or Murder,” Mickey Rooney is a lovestruck pianist who conspires with his lover to bump off her husband (12/8/1949). Finally, he stars in “Alibi Me” as a small time hood who needs to work backwards to come up with an alibi after he impulsively murders a rival (¼/1951).