What happened to Celebrity Big Brother star Mickey Rourke’s face after ‘breaking nose twice’
He pursued professional boxing for a short time.
As Celebrity Big Brother gears up for an imminent return on ITV, Hollywood star Mickey Rourke is a shock inclusion in the leaked lineup.
The 72-year-old former professional boxer and prolific screen star is swapping out the glamourous movie sets for the Big Brother house in the latest season of the beloved reality show hosted by Will Best and AJ Odudu.
The actor rose to fame in the 70s and 80s, going on to star in a slew of action and thriller films such as Angel Heart, Sin City and The Wrestler, for which he was Oscar nominated.
He famously took an interlude in his showbiz career in the early 90s to pursue professional boxing where he secured six wins, two draws and multiple facial injuries.
And he has had a turbulent, and controversial, personal and professional life including his speculated decades-long feud with Robert De Niro which began on the set of neo-noir Angel Heart.
In recent years he has been put on blast for calling Amber Heard a ‘gold-digger’ after her legal dispute with Johnny Depp and Mission Impossible star Tom Cruise ‘irrelevant’.
Has Mickey Rourke had plastic surgery? The Hollywood actor suffered several injuries while boxing (Picture: THA/REX/Shutterstock)Mickey endured several injuries during his time as a professional boxer including a twice-broken nose, a snapped cheekbone and harm to his ribs and toes.
And as early as his appearance in the 1989 movie Wild Orchid, fans were speculating over injuries given his out-of-the-norm, swollen cheeks.
As such he underwent surgery, although admitted that he put his trust in the ‘wrong guy’.
“Most of it was to mend the mess of my face because of the boxing, but I went to the wrong guy to put my face back together,” he told The Daily Mail in 2009.
He continued: ‘I had my nose broken twice. I had five operations on my nose and one on a smashed cheekbone.
The actor rose to prominence in the 80s (Picture: Kobal/REX/Shutterstock) He has occasionally spoken about his surgery journey (Picture: Kristin Callahan/ACE Pictures/REX/Shutterstock)‘I had to have cartilage taken from my ear to rebuild my nose and a couple of operations to scrape out the cartilage because the scar tissue wasn’t healing properly.’
He has had multiple nose jobs including one in 2017. He shared a post-surgery picture on Instagram at the time.
Then captioned it: ‘Moments after nose surgery with Dr. Dhir. Now i am “pretty again”:(lol)…one more to go. I don’t know what day it is don’t even realize operation is over,’ per E! News.
View this post on InstagramA post shared by MICKEY ROURKE (@mickey_rourke_)
What is Mickey Rourke’s net worth?His wide-spanning career means Mickey has accumulated a vast net worth estimated at $5m (£3.8m) and is believed to be raking in an additional £1 million for this gig, per sources for Mail Online.
And this is a strong rumoured contestant for the show, as an insider told The Sun: ‘It’s hard to think of a Big Brother booking as big as Mickey Rourke since the show began.
‘Sharon Osbourne was an impressive name last series but a Hollywood icon of Mickey’s standing brings a huge amount of clout.
His acting and boxing career have landed his a tidy estimated net worth (Picture: David X Prutting/BFA/REX/Shutterstock)‘The tales that man has to tell will no doubt be legendary and bosses hope it could replicate the success of Sharon last year, who was very loose-lipped when it came to dishing the dirt on famous faces.”
‘Mickey is also outspoken, with strong views, and isn’t afraid to share them.’
In an interview with The Standard in 2012, Mickey opened up about the destructive period of his life in the 80s and 90s.
‘I wasn’t a little bit bad, I was horrible for 15, 16 years. I was out of control, I was out of my mind.
‘I had to lose my house, my wife, my money, my career, everything, for me to fall all the way down to the bottom.
‘Then somebody advised me I needed to talk to somebody. I resisted but I went, because everything was gone.’
During the same chat, he revealed he had made $1m (£759k) during his five-and-a-half years as a boxer. He caveated at the time that ‘a million dollars isn’t really a million dollars any more’ and at one point even had debts of up to $60k (£45k).
Elsewhere in his personal life he has also been twice married, once to Moment to Moment actress Debra Feuer from 1981 to 1989 and then to model and Wild Orchis co-star Carre Otis from 1992 to 1998.
Who did Mickey Rourke play in Iron Man 2?Mickey played Russian physicist and villain Ivan Vanka aka Whiplash in the second Iron Man movie opposite Robert Downey Jr as the titular MCU hero.
The end of the movie saw him self-destruct his armour, preventing any further movie cameos.
Mickey played the main villain in Iron Man 2 (Picture: Marvel/Paramount/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock)The actor has previously shared his creative differences with Marvel when it came to Whiplash’s portrayal.
He told Crave Online that he had told writer Justin Theroux he wanted to ‘bring some other layers and colours, not just make this Russian a complete murderous revenging bad guy’ which he was able to do.
Mickey continued: ‘Unfortunately, the [people] at Marvel just wanted a one-dimensional bad guy, so most of the performance ended up the floor.
‘If they want to make mindless comic book movies, then I don’t want to be a part of that. I don’t want to have to care so much and work so hard, and then fight them for intelligent reasoning, and just because they’re calling the shots they…
‘You know, I didn’t work for three months on the accent and all the adjustments and go to Russia just so I could end up on the floor,’ per Screenrant.
Who else is in the Celebrity Big Brother 2025 line up?Mickey is joined by a star-studded and chaotic rumoured line-up including Tiffany Pollard (almost a decade on from ‘David’s dead’), Dance Moms star Jojo Siwa as well as Trisha Goddard, Patsy Palmer, Jack P Shepherd, Donna Preston and Daley Thompson.
Celebrity Big Brother returns to ITV on Monday, April 7.
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