Hollywood legend Mickey Rooney dies

LOS ANGELES (AFP) ― Mickey Rooney, the child actor who danced with Judy Garland, married Ava Gardner and made more than 250 movies, died Sunday at his home in North Hollywood. He was 93.

Celebrity website TMZ said Rooney had been ill for some time and died of natural causes. Police in Los Angeles said members of his large family were at his side.

“It is with sadness that I say my father has passed today,” his son, choreographer Michael Rooney, said on Twitter. “I loved him and so did the world. He inspired so many. RIP dad.”

Rooney rose to fame alongside Garland as the plucky diminutive lad ― he was 1.6 meters tall ― in the “Andy Hardy” movies of the late 1930s and early 1940s.

He also had notable turns as Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1935) and in “National Velvet” (1944), opposite Elizabeth Taylor, then 13.

More recently the still-energetic Rooney appeared in the 2006 comedy “Night at the Museum,” and in the 2011 movie “The Muppets.”

A four-time Oscar nominee, Rooney was awarded an honorary Academy Award in 1982 for lifetime achievement.

While professionally successful, Rooney had a rocky personal life.

He made and lost millions of dollars, married eight times and legally separated from his last wife, Jan, in June 2012. Along the way he fathered nine children.

“Mickey Rooney got all the best babes despite being short as hell. #RIP beautiful man,” said Lena Dunham, creator and star of the hipster TV series “Girls,” on Twitter.