Mitchum, Robert

Mitchum, Robert (1917-1997), American actor, born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the son of an Irish railway worker who died while Mitchum was still a child. Mitchum was unhappy at school and ran away from home for the first time aged 14. During the Depression years he worked as a miner in Pennsylvania before travelling west to begin a career in the theatre, acting, producing, and writing short plays for children. His writing eventually led him to work on lyrics for musical comedies.

Mitchum’s film debut was in a thoroughly forgettable Hollywood Western, Border Patrol (1943), after which he tried a number of different areas, including vaudeville, before settling—briefly—into a niche as an action player in war films such as 30 Seconds over Tokyo (1944) and The Story of G. I. Joe (1945). However, it was not until the end of World War II and the beginning of the new vogue for naturalism that Mitchum became a major star, and his gift for looking as if he were thinking and feeling beneath a calm exterior came to be fully appreciated. A big, agile man with hooded eyes and a humorous, relaxed manner, he quickly broadened his range as an actor with a string of interesting roles—notably in Edward Dmytryk’s unconventional Crossfire (1947), Out of the Past (1947), directed by Jacques Tourneur, John Farrow’s Where Danger Lives (1950) and His Kind of Woman (1951), and the Josef von Sternberg picture Macao (1952). Other films of this period include the remarkable Angel Face (1952), directed by Otto Preminger, as well as his intelligent, dignified portrait of a veteran rodeo rider in The Lusty Men (1952), directed by Nicholas Ray.

In 1955, Mitchum created a masterpiece, largely unnoticed at the time, with his role as the evil, demented preacher in The Night of the Hunter, directed by Charles Laughton; from this time on, however, his growing international fame led him to repeat again and again the lonely, manly, unsentimental, but warm-hearted American character from The Lusty Men, which he had by now perfected. His films of the early 1960s, among them The Grass is Greener (1960) and Mister Moses (1965), were of lesser interest, and though he came through later with a couple of superb performances in El Dorado (1967), directed by Howard Hawks, and Secret Ceremony (1968), directed by Joseph Losey, his obvious unhappiness in the David Lean film Ryan’s Daughter (1970) looked terminal. However, Mitchum’s star quality won out in the role of a cynical gangster in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), and before long he was contributing his huge stamina and authority to television epics—most notably the blockbusting mini-series about World War II, The Winds of War (1980) and War and Remembrance (1988)—while continuing to work regularly in Hollywood productions, such as Andrei Konchalovsky’s Maria’s Lovers (1984), Richard Donner’s Scrooged (1988), Cape Fear (1991) by Martin Scorsese (having played the lead in the 1961 original), and Dead Man (1995) by Jim Jarmusch.

It is not surprising, therefore, that many critics feel that no Hollywood actor—with the possible exception of Burt Lancaster—racked up as many memorable films since the war as had Mitchum. He died in his sleep on July 1, 1997.