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Robert Mitchum Bio
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Robert Mitchum Robert Mitchum was once called 'the soul of film noir'; he was an actor who enjoyed an enormous cult following, playing some of cinema's most famous villains, and he also found fame as a singer and songwriter. Robert Charles Durman Mitchum was born on August the 6th, 1917, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His father, James, was a mechanic, working in shipyards and on the railroad; his mother, Ann, was a Norwegian immigrant. He had a sister, Julie Mitchum, who became a stage actress, and a brother, John Mitchum, who would go on to become a songwriter and actor and appear in some of his films. When his father died in a railway accident shortly before his second birthday his mother was left to raise the family alone, earning a meagre wage as a Linotype operator. She struggled to cope with his rebelliousness and, when he was twelve, sent him away to live with his grandparents in Felton, Delaware. From there he got into further scrapes, managing to get himself expelled from school. When his sister set up her own home in New York City she took him in, but he stayed there only a few years. He became an itinerant drifter, taking jobs as a ditch digger and as a boxer, until he was arrested and put to work as part of a chain gang in Savannah, Georgia. Escaping, he injured his leg severely, and he settled in his grandparents' home to recover. After a short period of recuperation, Mitchum moved to California to rejoin his sister, who convinced him to join her theatre guild. There he worked as a writer, occasionally taking small roles in their productions. Eventually this led to work as an extra in the film industry. His knack for looking villainous led RKO to offer him a seven year contract for playing bad guys and their henchmen in B-movie westerns, and eventually he was given a role in a war film, William A Wellman's Story of G.I Joe, which became a surprise hit and earned him a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Oscars. Overnight, he found himself a star. Mitchum's A-list career began just as the film noir genre was becoming a success, and it was there that he spent most of his career, appearing in classics such as Undercurrent (with Katherine Hepburn and Robert Taylor), The Big Steal (with Jane Greer and William Bendix), Otto Preminger's Angel Face (with Jean Simmons), and The Night of the Hunter (with Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish). In the latter he created one of cinema's best known and most terrifying villains.
In 1962, he created a similar monster to terrorise Gregory Peck's family in Cape Fear. Later years saw him taking on more diverse work, appearing as a romantic hero opposite Sarah Miles in David Lean's acclaimed Ryan's Daughter and playing the archetypal detective Philip Marlowe alongside Charlotte Rampling and Harry Dean Stanton in Farewell, My Lovely, a part he would reprise for The Big Sleep (with Jimmy Stewart). Even as late as the 1990s he was finding his way into cult classics such as Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, which also starred Johnny Depp. When not kept sufficiently busy by the film industry, Mitchum achieved some success as a country music artist, releasing two albums and successfully using his music to promote his films. He enjoyed a substantial fan base with a youth element which remained loyal to him even when he spoke out in support of the Vietnam War. Mitchum married only once; his wife was Dorothy Spence, the shy Delaware girl who had helped him when he injured his leg, and he remained with her to the end of his days. Together they had three children: James Mitchum and Christopher Mitchum, who would become successful actors, and Trini Mitchum, who had a small role in Michael Winner's The Mechanic. His grandchildren Bentley C Mitchum and Carrie Mitchum also entered the acting profession, whilst his grandson Kian Mitchum became a successful model. Mitchum died on July the 1, 1997, after a long battle with lung cancer. Despite John Wayne's comment that "He's been retiring ever since the first day I met him," he had never successfully managed to quit the business. At his insistence, no memorial service was held; instead, his wife and close friend Jane Russell scattered his ashes at sea. |
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