The Mickey Rooney Show three stormy marriages by the early 1950s to actresses Ava Gardner, Martha Vickers, and Betty Jane Rase had marred his wholesome "Andy Hardy" image. (His fourth wife at the time, Elaine, was not an actress.) Although Rooney was thirty-four years old in 1954, his character Mickey Mulligan was only twenty-three. The series aired from August 28, 1954, to June 4, 1955 on Saturday evenings opposite the first half-hour of both CBS's "The Jackie Gleason Show" and ABC's "The Dotty Mack Show", a low-budget novelty program in which Dotty Mack lip-synced many of the works of other singers. Rooney's then-manager Maurice
Brian Rooney (actor) and Rooney were told by the show's celebrity judge, Adelaide based TV and radio personality Anne Wills, that they should try acting as they had the "face for television". Consequently, Rooney auditioned with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for a role on "G.P." Rooney began his career playing the street-wise urchin Gavroche in the Australian stage production of Les Misérables. Soon after, he went on to play the character Tommy Franco, alongside Dolph Lundgren and Louis Gossett, Jr., in the 1989 feature film "The Punisher". As a child actor, Rooney became best known on Australian television during the early 1990s for