Rourke's return

Mickey Rourke turns up for our interview 30 minutes late - and insists we do it in the hotel bar. It's 4.30pm and he's just got up. If you didn't know any better, you'd think Rourke had gone back to his infamous bad-boy ways.

But the Hollywood hellraiser, who was once dubbed the new James Dean before he turned punch-drunk pugilist and his career plummeted, is a changed man. He no longer drinks and has the rage that saw him arrested for spousal abuse under control.

The reason for his long lie-in is Sin City, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's stunning adaptation of the latter's noir-inflected graphic novel series. 'We had our premiere last night,' he grunts, apologetically. He has a right to celebrate. After years on the ropes, Mickey Rourke is a champ once more.

His return has come at a heavy price. Now 48, he no longer sports the pretty boy looks that shot him to stardom in the Eighties with films like Angel Heart and 91/2Weeks. Four years of pummelling in the ring - after he turned pro in 1990 as his acting career hit the skids - and subsequent facial surgery have seen to that.

His skin is like tan leather, and those razor-sharp cheekbones are long-since lost, as his flabby neck melts into his bloated face. Dressed in a black suit, with a silk hanky peeping out of the top pocket and a pair of brown sunglasses perched on his forehead, he reminds me of The Thing from The Fantastic Four.
Except that he orders a pot of tea and is unfailingly polite.

A producer once compared Rourke to John Travolta - 'famous but faded - he just needs to find his Pulp Fiction'. With Sin City, he has found it. 'Yeah, but Travolta didn't raise hell for 15 f***king years like I did,' Rourke counters.

'They wouldn't let me in the game. They said I was all washed up. Very few can come back from how far I've fallen. I said to my psychiatrist one day, "If some of those motherf***ers had fallen down as far as I did, and lived the way I was living for the past 10 years, they'd blow their ****ing brains out." My doctor said to me, "Mickey - none of those guys would ever have an idea how to fall that far. Only you can fall that far." And that summed it up for me.'

Rourke's demise is already the stuff of Hollywood legend. Bad career choices - he turned down Pulp Fiction, Platoon and Rain Man but embraced the soft-porn disaster Wild Orchid. Bad marriages - after splitting from his first wife Debra Feuer, he wed model and Wild Orchid co star Carré Otis in 1992.

Two years later, Otis claimed he had punched and kicked her in a bust-up. The charges were dropped after they briefly reconciled before divorcing in 1998. Bad company - running around with late rapper Tupac Shakur, mob boss John Gotti and Hell's Angels chief Sonny Barger.

'It was never drugs or alcohol. I was just a little crazy,' he says. 'The shame that I had from stuff turned to anger. And I couldn't turn the anger off. When I finally lost everything - my house, my wife, my life, my money, my credibility - then I wanted to change. I talked to doctors. I didn't know how to do it. I had a lot of stuff inside me that was broke.'

He now relies on therapy to get him through the days. He's a humble figure, devoid of the arrogance that almost swallowed him whole. Until now, his comeback has been baby-steps: the transvestite inmate in Animal Factory, a bereaved father in The Pledge. But, after impressing Rodriguez in the director's Once Upon A Time In Mexico, he got his reward.