 Born to vaudeville performers, Rooney was nudged into show business by his mother after his parents divorced. In 1926, Rooney starred in 78 short film comedies in the role of the cocky, self-assured tough little kid, Mickey McGuire. He was only six years old. From then on, Rooney, born Joe Yule, Jr., was known as Mickey McGuire. Several years later Rooney was hired by Universal to appear in The Information Kid on the stipulation he don a new image. A publicity man began making up surnames: Maloney... Downey...Looney. Mickey's mother suggested Rooney. After checking with his boss, the publicity man returned to say it was a done deal. Rooney recalls the event in his autobiography, Life is Too Short (Villard Books, 1991): "He never bothered to ask me whether I liked it. This is the kind of world I was born in, one in which I had only one reason for existence: pleasing others." Please them he did. In the 1930s Rooney became famous for his role in the Andy Hardy series, he received a special Academy Award for the film Boys Town with Spencer Tracy, and he made Babes in Arms, his first major musical with Judy Garland, earning an Academy Award nomination as best actor. Box-office receipts for 1938-1940 made him the number one star in the world. Since that time, Rooney's career has spanned decades and includes such movie classics as The Human Comedy, National Velvet, Midsummer Night's Dream, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, The Black Stallion, and a television Emmy for Bill. He has worked with some of the best-known actors of the day: Jackie Cooper, Freddie Bartholomew, Buck Jones, Wallace Beery, Judy Garland ("Judy was the greatest entertainer in the world, but unfortunately, she never found the happiness she so rightly deserved."), and Jimmy Cagney ("He went on strike at Warner Bros., until they gave him $10 million flat. Jack Warner let Cagney stew for a year...until a New York board meeting. They were appalled to find out why Cagney hadn't made a picture for more than a year. A board member told Warner, 'You're costing us hundreds of millions. Pay the s-- of a b---- the ten million.").
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