Booted Celebrity Big Brother housemate Mickey Rourke’s ex-wife has claimed that the actor threatened to kill himself with a razor sharp blade used by Japanese samurais if she refused to marry him. Writing in her 2011 memoir, Beauty, Disrupted, model Carré Otis recalled the pressure she felt to agree to marry her partner of three years, and how the proposal came after the couple hadn’t seen one another for several months.
Otis had distanced herself from Rourke after accidentally shooting herself with a gun he had hidden in her handbag. Otis was 19 when she met her future husband – then aged 37 – on the set of steamy movie Wild Orchid in 1989. They were married from 1992 to 1998. Just a few years into their marriage, in 1994, Rourke was arrested following accusations of domestic abuse. The charges were eventually dropped.
In her book, Otis claims that on June 25, 1992 he sent a limo to pick her up from Los Angeles and drive her up the Californian coast to Big Sur, where he was waiting for her sat on the bonnet of a “periwinkle blue ’69 Road Runner hot rod”. Here, he told her that he loved and needed her.
“I wasn’t really surprised to get a call. I gave in. Just like that. My longing, my loneliness, everything that remained unresolved, had me buying into the hope that we could still set ourselves on the right course,” she wrote, adding that she tried to explain how his behaviour had hurt her, but she still loved him.
“Before I knew what he was doing, he got down on one knee. ‘Marry me, Carré,’ he said. ‘Jesus, Mickey. Wait. I haven’t seen you in months!’ I was starting to feel panicked. ‘I need time, some time to think about this.’
“’No. You answer me now,’ he said firmly. Standing up, he went to the back of the car and opened the trunk. ‘I can’t live without you,’ he said again, pulling out a long sword wrapped in beautiful Japanese cloth. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.
“’It’s a hari-kari knife,’ he replied, unwrapping it. The long metal sword caught the afternoon light. Mickey stared into my eyes. ‘Answer me or I will die.'”
Otis added that she felt a terror wash over her, as she knew Mickey was intense and unpredictable.
She continued: “Was he serious? I wasn’t sure. I was terrified. I waited a beat. I recognised his standard my-way-or-the-highway ultimatum in all this, but it was tinged with a threat of a different kind this time. I heard myself say, ‘Yes, Mickey. I will marry you.'”
The couple wed the next day in the bride’s home city of San Francisco, “A justice of the peace oversaw our vows as we stood several feet from a Dumpster in Golden Gate Park.”
Speaking to Piers Morgan on his CNN show in 2012 about the memoirs, Rourke said: “I don’t have any desire to read it, to me that is something that happened over 20 years ago. From what I’ve heard about it, it’s probably a little bit of sour grapes and chasing the buck and a delusional, narcissistic self-centred point of view.
“As it was put to me, you were in love with the idea of who you wanted her [Otis] to be, not who she really is.”
Mickey was kicked off Celebrity Big Brother by ITV bosses for “further use of inappropriate language” and “instances of unacceptable behaviour” following several unacceptable incidents last week.
Over the weekend, he allegedly exhibited behaviour and used language that was deemed threatening towards housemate Chris Hughes, although there was no physical altercation.
A spokesman for ITV said: “Mickey Rourke has agreed to leave the Celebrity Big Brother House this evening following a discussion with Big Brother regarding further use of inappropriate language and instances of unacceptable behaviour.”
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