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“Very few men can fall as far as I have and come back. People see me and it’s like they’ve seen a ghost, like I’m back from the dead.” Growing up in Miami, Florida after his parents divorced in the late 1950s, Mickey Rourke dreamed of becoming a famous boxer and set out to make a name for himself in the ring. Before he was even a teenager, he started boxing competitively and, after winning his first match, was hooked on the sport. He was soon one of the best amateur boxers in the area throughout the late 1960s and 1970s with a record of 27 wins and 3 losses before a series of concussions temporarily ended his career.

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Rourke’s retirement from the ring prompted him to turn his attention to his second passion—acting. In the early 1970s, he borrowed $400 from his sister and moved to New York where, in addition to escaping a warrant for his arrest in Florida, he took private acting lessons and launched his career. Landing small roles in television films throughout the rest of the decade, it wasn’t until 1981 when Rourke found his first taste of success in Body Heat. The following year, he starred in Diner and followed up with a string of hits including Rumble Fish and 9 ½ Weeks.

Although Rourke was finally a star in Hollywood, he still wasn’t satisfied and returned to the ring in 1991 as he told fans he “had to go back to boxing because he was self-destructing…and had no respect for himself as an actor.” Nearly 40 years old at the time, Rourke’s second stint in the ring lasted only eight matches—all of which he won—but came at a high price of short-term memory loss paired with a series of broken bones that led him straight to the operating room to repair everything from a broken nose to a split tongue and collapsed cheekbone.

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Knowing he had to repair his mangled face before ever returning to Hollywood, Rourke went under the knife in the 1990s after a pair of broken noses required five operations to fix. Although he wasn’t completely distraught about his “battle scars” or his drastically beaten and rugged face, he knew that surgery was inevitable but it wasn’t until he had a few procedures under his belt that he realized things weren’t going well.

“I went to the wrong guy to put my face back together [after leaving the ring],” Rourke admitted. “I had to have cartilage taken from my ear to rebuild my nose and a couple of operations to scrape out the cartilage because the scar tissue wasn’t healing properly.” After the surgeries, Rourke faced harsher criticism than ever before as the media called him “craggy” and poorly put together while acting offers were fewer and farther between. Instead of the starring roles he once enjoyed, he found himself as an afterthought in films like Fall Time and later regretted turning down a part in Pulp Fiction that ultimately went to Bruce Willis. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, right?

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By the new millennium, Rourke decided it was time to correct the botched surgeries with the hopes of revitalizing his career. The second round of procedures restructured his cheeks and nose to resemble his younger days, which caught everyone’s attention for all the right reasons. Heck, even Hollywood came calling and offered Rourke major roles in Iron Man 2 and The Wrestler, which earned him a coveted Academy Award nomination.

Although Rourke was finally back to his “old” self, he couldn’t let things be and, as many fans and critics point out, has opted for a few more plastic surgeries in recent years. Today, the 64-year-old looks like he’s had multiple facelifts, Botox injections and even lip fillers to plump his pout. In 2015, the media went wild when one source leaked, “Rourke is having bone taken from his hip grafted onto the roof of his mouth so that he can get new teeth implants.” Another source said, “He’s hooked on surgery because he wakes up in the morning and looks in the mirror and doesn’t like what he sees.”

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Rourke has yet to confirm any additional surgeries even though it’s obvious he’s been back on the operating table in the last decade—and everyone has noticed! Lenny Dykstra, a former baseball player, got into a heated argument with Rourke and later said that the actor looks like the “Crypt Keeper” thanks to his multiple plastic surgeries over the years. But, is his new look helping or hurting his career? With his last starring role coming in 2014 in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, the rumored “Crypt Keeper” might have taken things too far once and for all. Then again, in Rourke’s wild and chaotic world, if a little is good then even more is better.