KEY POINTS:
When Mickey Rourke thanked the pet canines - among others, many of them people - that stayed loyal and kept him company during his wilderness years as he accepted his Golden Globe this week for best actor, it was a telling moment.
After all, Rourke's career had largely
gone to the dogs since the films which first made his name in the 1980s.
And his face, disfigured from a seeming combination of boxing and botox, was unrecognisable as the star of 9 Weeks or Angel Heart.
But in a curious way, his damaged looks have helped in his performance in The Wrestler, the leading role marking a remarkable return for the actor.
Since the early 90s his films have largely headed straight for the video shelves and his name made it hard for The Wrestler's director Darren Aronofsky to get finance for his film.
At an interview earlier, Rourke, despite saying it had been "a long road back for me" at the Globes, doesn't like like the word "comeback".
"If you look in the dictionary you can define many things as a comeback," he growls.
"People come back from war with no legs, people come back from eating a nice dinner ... trying to define it is hard, and where I came back from only my little dogs would know."
Rather, he calls what he is experiencing a second chance.
"There was a time about six years ago when I didn't think I was going to get a second chance so I was living off fumes. I wasn't even living on dreams.
"Sometimes in this life, when you lose something, you lose everything, because there's a lot attached to success. There's fame, there's money, there's power and there are the people you're with.
"When you lose all that, the people around you don't want to be with you anymore because you're a loser, a has-been, and I'd rather be dead than be a has-been."
Never one to hold back from speaking his mind, Rourke is his own worst enemy.
His latest indiscretion has reportedly been to call his friend Sean Penn homophobic, just as the Oscar voters are mulling over their nominations - which most likely will include both actors.
Over the years some actors have avoided working with him and an earlier chance of a comeback was lost when Nicole Kidman, whom he has called "an ice cube", refused to appear alongside him in Jane Campion's In The Cut. (Kidman didn't make the film in any case.)
Still, Rourke can blame only himself for his career lull, which had been the result of his poor decisions. He declined films like Beverly Hills Cop, Pulp Fiction, Platoon, Rain Man, The Silence of the Lambs and Top Gun, to make macho dross like Year of the Dragon, Desperate Hours and Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man.
Even if after the break-up of his second marriage, to Carrie Otis, he sank about as low as an actor can go, living alone and loved by only his brood of chihuahuas, he maintained a band of fans who wanted to see him again on centre stage.
One was Rourke's friend of 20 years, Bruce Springsteen, who in writing The Wrestler's haunting title song clearly shows how the character Rourke plays, Randy "The Ram" Robinson, mirrors the real man.
"Bruce was very busy on a European tour and I wrote him a letter describing the film," Rourke recalls.
"He responded to me the week he lost a band member of 30 years, after losing another member a few months earlier. He didn't have the best year in the world and he decided to do something very generous and he did it for nothing. The song's really special and I cried when I heard it."
All this naturally wouldn't have happened had Aronofsky - after being mauled himself over the failure of his indecipherable previous film, The Fountain - not insisted on Rourke's casting over Nicolas Cage, another Rourke fan who gladly stepped aside.
The Wrestler ultimately was made with a minuscule US$6 million ($11.2 million) budget.
Shot in a hand-held style, the film follows Randy's desperate bid to make a comeback in the ring.
When he realises his life will be endangered if he continues to wrestle, he strikes up a relationship with another embattled soul, ageing stripper Marisa Tomei, and he gets in contact with his long-lost daughter, Evan Rachel Wood.
"I never did a movie where I had a daughter or anything like that," Rourke admits, "and to have a pretty daughter was strange to me.
"I tried to make it personal because I'd abandoned her when I was busy trying to fit into my tights. She became a kind of a lesbian drug addict and had a tough time."
There's no doubting that in the past Rourke has powerfully embodied deeply lonely characters, most famously with Barfly and now here with Randy. "I didn't have a problem with that, I've been like that for a long time," he says as if he and Randy are one and the same.
Rourke, who was born in Schenectady, New York, and raised in Miami, was an athletic kid and part of a big brood. But he was a little cowardly in his youth - or at least according to his policeman stepfather, who said he ran away from a fight in which his stepbrothers were involved.
Clearly wanting to prove himself a macho man like his siblings, he took up amateur boxing before pursuing acting as a career.
He returned to the sport as a professional in 1991 and surrounded himself with some pretty seedy characters.
"I don't have an entourage any more," he says. "I used to be colourful but not any more. You pay the price for being colourful."
Before making The Wrestler, Rourke knew little about a sport that is considered largely for show and mostly fake. (Not to mention that the bulked-up guys wear lycra suits that he ultimately had fun helping to design.)
"I looked down on it until Darren made me go to wrestling school for two months. It really broke my arse! Then I slowly gained respect for these guys because even though it's choreographed as entertainment, when you have someone who's 120kg throwing you across the room, you get hurt.
We did a lot of research looking at wrestlers from the 1960s right up to the present day, and it turns out there are a lot of people in the wrestling business that are very famous but they aren't necessarily very good.
"It's like in the acting business, or even politics, where people who are not very good become famous."
Rourke certainly knows about Randy's yearning to get back into the ring. "When I was 38 my doctor said I had to stop, that if I continued the brain damage would be so severe I wouldn't be able to count money. To say I'm too old to do something is not my mentality."
He of course surged ahead, although he suffered numerous damages including the facial injuries that no amount of plastic surgery could mend.
"I hated it when I had to stop fighting and Randy also is too old to keep wrestling. He's never going to be the big star he was in the 1980s, he's never going to have that second chance that I've had now as an actor. Athletes don't get that."
Rourke says making The Wrestler was "the best and the hardest" experience of his acting career. Where he goes now is anyone's guess. But one thing's for sure - he'll go down fighting.
* The Wrestler is due for release in New Zealand in April.
