I was married for 35 years to actor Tom O’Rourke. He’d studied acting at Goodman Theater, Chicago University, on the GI Bill from his service as a paratrooper and MP in the 101st Airborne. He was a steadily working actor on Law and Order, Law and Order SVU, X-Files, Maid in Manhattan, costarred with Sandra Bullock on the TV sitcom Working Girl and many more movies and TV shows. He was a very talented actor who never realized his great potential.


For years, watching him struggle, constantly auditioning and being rejected, I felt great admiration for his perseverance. As he grew older, he attributed his increasing depression to his lack of success, eliciting my sympathy.


It turned out he had a secret life and an obsessive delusion; he was driven by deeply buried fears that had plagued him since his childhood in which he'd been abused by both his mother and father.


People scoff at the lasting effects of childhood abuse, but I buried a man who was abused into an early grave by the immature behavior of his violent, alcoholic, narcissist parents. This is the story of his strange double life.  

About

Author Marcy Casterline O’Rourke is a graduate of Barnard College at Columbia University, former Eileen Ford high fashion model, and veteran actress of dozens of TV commercials. While pursuing her career, she met and married ex US Army paratrooper and Chicago University’s Goodman Theater alumnus, actor Tom O’Rourke. He subsequently became a popular TV star, creating the role of Justin Marler on the soap opera the Guiding Light; later co-starring opposite Sandra Bullock in the sitcom Working Girl for NBC; working as a regular on all the Law and Order shows, and appearing in Maid in Manhattan, American Gangster, United 93, and many more TV shows and films.