Mickey Rourke and 'Britain's hardest man' ran like 'scared rabbits' after hooligan brawl
Hollywood superstar Mickey Rourke is set to open up about his extraordinary life on Celebrity Big Brother and below a former gangster reveals the night the actor bizarrely encountered football hooligans
Mickey Rourke is set to join Celebrity Big Brother – one of the biggest names to ever take part in the reality show that has been running since 2001.
The Hollywood A-lister is an Oscar nominee and the 72-year-old has lived a rollercoaster life both on and off screen.
Ahead of the CBB launch on Monday, a source 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.
“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.”
Despite being from New York, Mickey is not completely unfamiliar with British culture, particularly when it comes to football hooliganism, which was known as the ‘English disease’ in the 1970s and 1980s.
This is at least according to claims made in ex-East End mobster Danny Woollard’s book called Wild Cats where he said football fans caused trouble at a boxing match where Gene Hackman and Mickey were in attendance.
It was headlined by underground boxer and notorious bouncer Lenny McClean who was nicknamed ‘Britain’s hardest man’.
But during the bouts at Woodford Football Club, the author claimed a member of West Ham’s Inter City Firm (ICF) gang was beaten unconscious in the audience.
Writing in his book, Danny said: “Lenny Mclean and a few very large black men started to give this drunken youth a kicking. Barry Dalton and Billy Williams stopped it.
“Bill dragged this young man out, but unbeknown to anyone, ‘The Bomb’ set about this chap and gave him a proper hiding.”
Billy was a former heavyweight boxer who was once trained by Angelo Dundee, the former trainer of Muhammad Ali.
As told in the book, trouble first started when the reveller grabbed the shorts of a fallen fighter in the ring to prevent him standing.
According to Danny, once the young man “regained consciousness", he began calling his football hooligan pals.
Describing what happened next, he said: “They all came, motor-loads of them, tooled up and looking for revenge.
“Roy Shaw, McLean, Williams, Carrington, Mickey Rourke and all the actors ran like scared rabbits to the club house, Woody’s, and locked themselves safely away. The Inter City Firm smashed the place to pieces.”
Hollywood actor Mickey is a known fight fan and back in 2014 he returned to the ring to beat Elliot Seymour in an exhibition bout in Moscow when he was 62.
And perhaps he can provide more insight into his eventful life next week on CBB where he will be joined by the likes of Corrie favourite Jack P. Shepherd, Chesney Hawkes and Love Island’s Chris Hughes.