Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb opens later this year and will be the cinematic swan song of veteran Hollywood star Mickey Rooney. We take a look at the final movies, both glorious and ignoble, of some of Hollywood’s other Golden Age talents.
Orson Welles The Transformers: The Movie (1986)
Twenty-one years before Michael Bay got his over-excited hands on the cult Hasbro toy line, this cinema spin-off of the kids cartoon series gave the director and star of Citizen Kane (The Greatest Film Ever Made™) his big-screen sayonara. "You know what I did this morning?” Welles told his biographer shortly before he died. “I played the voice of a toy. I play a planet. I menace somebody called something-or-other. Then I'm destroyed. My plan to destroy whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen.”
James Stewart An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991)
Born in 1908, James Stewart’s career stretched from the Depression-era 1930s to 1991 when he voiced Sheriff Wylie Burp in the otherwise unremarkable animated sequel An American Tail: Fievel Goes West. Despite being produced by the mighty Steven Spielberg, it tanked at the box office. (Interesting pub fact: co-director Simon Wells is the great-grandson of sci-fi novelist HG Wells.)
Bette Davis Wicked Stepmother (1989)
The fag-chewing Hollywood legend – then aged 81 – apparently walked off this calamitous comedy about a chain-smoking witch after producers refused her demands of a root and branch rewrite. In the end, to account for her abrupt exit, they were forced to rewrite it, with Davis’ character morphing into a cat for most of the movie. Davis only appears in the film for roughly 11 minutes, despite her above-the-title billing. She died only a few months later.
James Cagney Ragtime (1981)
Jimmy Cagney decided to call it quits, aged 62, after headlining Billy Wilder’s comedy One, Two, Three in 1961. However, he was coaxed out of retirement in 1981 for a small but pivotal role in Miloš Forman’s sweeping historical epic Ragtime. He was even paired with Pat O’Brien, whom he had starred opposite in numerous 1930s movies.
Marlon Brando The Score (2001)
Brando’s quality control was never that canny. For every Apocalypse Now there were a dozen The Island of Dr Moreaus. But he lucked out with his farewell role, which finally saw the Method giant share a screen with his cinematic heir Robert De Niro. The set was fraught with tension however, as Brando taunted his director, Frank Oz, whom he derisively referred to as ‘Miss Piggy” (Oz was the voice of Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear on The Muppet Show). Things got so bad that De Niro was forced to direct Brando’s scenes, with Oz giving him instructions via headset.
You can see Mickey Rooney’s final big-screen appearance when Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb lands at Cineworld on 19th December.
