‘Yet I insist: there was a time when Rourke demanded to be looked at, catching and holding your eye no less grippingly than the young De Niro. Sweetness and menace were folded up in him—in the way that he angled himself at the world, as if both sure of his place within it and, deeper down, afraid that it might still spit him out. Hence the voice: never a bellow or a screech, nor yet a Brando-haunted mumble, but the soft croon of a conspirator’ – Anthony Lane












