MACHO MAN? STAR’S TAKING THE MICKEY!

ABOVE: Mickey and that earring

MACHO Mickey Rourke is a secret softie who cried his eyes out when he had his ear pierced.

The rough, tough star of brutal, Oscar-nominated film The ­Wrestler, was quaking with fear ­before the needle even touched him.

The comical moment is one of a string of stories in a new book which suggests his tough-guy image is all an act.

Mickey Rourke: Wrestling With ­Demons reveals the star used to go to hairdressing school and several times was beaten up by neighbours.

Once he even dressed in drag on a plane flight to get into character for his role as a transvestite in 2000 movie flop Animal Factory.

The biography, by the Daily Star ­Sunday’s Los Angeles-based Hollywood expert Sandro Monetti, reveals the squeamish star’s ear-piercing antics.

His ex-hairdresser Teddy Antolin ­recalls: “Mickey started to cry and the ear got all pink. I told him, ­‘Mickey keep still, the needle’s not that long. It’s not going to go into your heart’. But he was like ‘Aaaarrgh!’”

New Yorker Mickey, 57, has spent a great deal of time as a single man ­despite being married twice – to babes Debra Feuer and Carré Otis.

But bachelorhood doesn’t seem to suit him either.

Joe Wheeler, the doorman of the LA apartment building where Mickey once lived alone with his little dogs, ­remembers the star struggling to look after himself.

“He once set the apartment on fire by falling asleep after putting a TV dinner in the oven,” Joe says.

“Another time we had to bandage him up after a guy attacked him on the street when he’d just gone out for a coffee.

“Things like that were always ­happening to Mickey as people in the neighbourhood tried to goad him into a fight.”

Mickey Rourke: Wrestling With ­Demons is published by JR Books and is out now.

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