OS ANGELES (AP) - Mickey Rooney's approach to life was simple: "Let's put on a show!" He spent nine decades doing it, on the big screen, on television, on stage and in his extravagant personal life.
Pint-sized, precocious, impish, irrepressible - perhaps hardy is the most-suitable adjective for Rooney, a perennial comeback artist whose early blockbuster success as the vexing but wholesome Andy Hardy and as Judy Garland's musical comrade in arms was bookended 70 years later with roles in "Night at the Museum" and "The Muppets."
Rooney died Sunday at age 93 surrounded by family at his North Hollywood home.
He was nominated for four Academy Awards over a four-decade span and received two special Oscars for film achievements, won an Emmy for his TV movie "Bill" and had a Tony nomination for his Broadway smash "Sugar Babies."
A small man physically, Rooney was prodigious in talent, scope, ambition and appetite. He sang and danced, played roles both serious and silly, wrote memoirs, a novel, movie scripts and plays and married eight times , siring 11 children.
After signing with MGM in 1934, Rooney landed his first big role playing Clark Gable's character as a boy in "Manhattan Melodrama." A year later, still only in his mid-teens, Rooney was doing Shakespeare, playing an exuberant Puck in Max Reinhardt's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which also featured James Cagney and Olivia de Havilland.
Rooney soon was earning $300 a week with featured roles in such films as "Riff Raff," ''Little Lord Fauntleroy," ''Captains Courageous" and "The Devil Is a Sissy."
Then came Andy Hardy in the 1937 comedy "A Family Affair," a role he would reprise in 15 more feature films over the next two decades. Centered on a kindly small-town judge (Lionel Barrymore) who delivers character-building homilies to troublesome son Andy, it was pure corn, but it turned out to be golden corn for MGM, becoming a runaway success with audiences.
Studio boss Louis B. Mayer saw "A Family Affair" as a template for a series of movies about a model American home. Cast changes followed, most notably with Lewis Stone replacing Barrymore in the sequels, but Rooney stayed on, his role built up until he became the focus of the films, which included "The Courtship of Andy Hardy," ''Andy Hardy's Double Life" and "Love Finds Andy Hardy," the latter featuring fellow child star Garland.
He played a delinquent humbled by Spencer Tracy as Father Flanagan in 1938's "Boys Town" and Mark Twain's timeless scamp in 1939's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Rooney's peppy, all-American charm was never better matched than when he appeared opposite Garland in such films as "Babes on Broadway" and "Strike up the Band," musicals built around that "Let's put on a show" theme.
One of them, 1939's "Babes in Arms," earned Rooney a best-actor Oscar nomination, a year after he received a special Oscar shared with Deanna Durbin for "bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth, and as juvenile players setting a high standard of ability and achievement."
He earned another best-actor nomination for 1943's "The Human Comedy," adapted from William Saroyan's sentimental tale about small-town life during World War II. The performance was among Rooney's finest.
"The Bold and the Brave," 1956 World War II drama, brought him an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor. But mostly, he played second leads in such films as "Off Limits" with Bob Hope, "The Bridges at Toko-Ri" with William Holden, and "Requiem for a Heavyweight" with Anthony Quinn.
In the early 1960s, he had a wild turn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" as Audrey Hepburn's bucktoothed Japanese neighbor, and he was among the fortune seekers in the all-star comedy "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World."
Rooney's starring roles came in low-budget films such as "Drive a Crooked Road," ''The Atomic Kid," ''Platinum High School," ''The Twinkle in God's Eye" and "How to Stuff a Wild Bikini."
He earned a fourth Oscar nomination, as supporting actor, for 1979's "Black Stallion," the same year he starred with Ann Miller in the Broadway revue "Sugar Babies," which brought him a Tony nomination and millions of dollars during his years with the show.
In 1981 came his Emmy-winning performance as a disturbed man in "Bill." He found success with voice roles for animated films such as "The Fox and the Hound," ''The Care Bears Movie" and the blockbuster "Finding Nemo."
Over the years, Rooney also made hundreds of appearances on TV talk and game shows, dramas and variety programs. He starred in three short-lived series: "The Mickey Rooney Show" (1954); "Mickey" (1964); and "One of the Boys" (1982). A co-star from "One of the Boys," Dana Carvey, later parodied Rooney on "Saturday Night Live," mocking him as a hopeless egomaniac who couldn't stop boasting he once was "the number one star ... IN THE WO-O-ORLD!"
A lifelong storyteller, Rooney wrote two memoirs: "i.e., an Autobiography" published in 1965, and "Life Is Too Short," 1991. He also produced a novel about a child movie star, "The Search for Sonny Skies," in 1994.
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