Robert Mitchum

Robert Mitchum, born Robert Charles Durman Mitchum on August 6, 1917, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was an American actor and singer. He built a career on antihero roles and became a defining presence in film noir. The American Film Institute ranked him 23rd on its list of the greatest male stars of classic American cinema. He earned an Academy Award nomination and a BAFTA Award nomination, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1984, and was given the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1992.

His breakthrough came with an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor in *The Story of G.I. Joe* (1945). Among his most famous films are *Out of the Past* (1947), *Angel Face* (1953), *River of No Return* (1954), *The Night of the Hunter* (1955), *Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison* (1957), *Thunder Road* (1958), *The Sundowners* (1960), *Cape Fear* (1962), *El Dorado* (1966), *Ryan’s Daughter* (1970), *The Friends of Eddie Coyle* (1973), and *Farewell, My Lovely* (1975). On television, he played U.S. Navy Captain Victor “Pug” Henry in the miniseries *The Winds of War* (1983) and its sequel *War and Remembrance* (1988–1989).

Film critic Roger Ebert called Mitchum his favorite movie star and the soul of film noir, describing him as having a deep, laconic voice, a long face, and weary eyes—the kind of man you’d find in a saloon at closing time, waiting for someone to break his heart. David Thomson wrote that since World War II, no American actor had made more first-class films in so many different moods.

Mitchum grew up in a Methodist family of Scots-Irish, Native American, and Norwegian descent. His father, James Thomas Mitchum, a shipyard and railroad worker, was killed in a railyard accident in Charleston, South Carolina, in February 1919. His mother, Ann Harriet Gunderson, a Norwegian immigrant and sea captain’s daughter, was pregnant at the time and received a government pension. She later married Lieutenant Hugh “The Major” Cunningham Morris, a former Royal Naval Reserve officer, and they had a daughter, Carol Morris. Mitchum had an older sister, Annette (known as Julie Mitchum during her acting career), and a younger brother, John.

As a child, Mitchum was a prankster prone to fistfights and mischief. In 1926, his mother sent him and his younger brother to live with her parents on a farm near Woodside, Delaware. He was expelled from Felton High School and ran away from home for the first time at age 11. In 1929, he and his brother moved to Philadelphia to live with their sister Julie, who was performing in vaudeville. The family later shared an apartment in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, where Mitchum attended Haaren High School until he was expelled.

At 14, he left home, hopping freight cars and working as a ditch digger, fruit picker, and dishwasher. In the summer of 1933, he was arrested for vagrancy in Savannah, Georgia, and put on a chain gang. He claimed he escaped and hitchhiked to Rising Sun, Delaware, where his family had moved. At 16, while recovering from injuries that nearly cost him a leg, he met 14-year-old Dorothy Spence, whom he later married. He worked briefly for the Civilian Conservation Corps before heading to Long Beach, California, in July 1934, where his sister had moved. Over the next three years, he traveled and took various jobs, including 27 professional boxing matches that ended after a fight broke his nose and left a scar on his left eye.

By 1937, Mitchum had settled in Long Beach. His sister Julie joined a local theater group, the Players Guild, and Mitchum began attending rehearsals with her. Encouraged by his mother, he joined the group, made his stage debut in August 1937, and wrote two children’s plays. He also wrote lyrics for Julie and other cabaret performers. In 1939, he wrote and composed an oratorio that Orson Welles produced and directed for a benefit for Jewish refugees. That same year, he worked as an assistant for astrologer Carroll Righter on an Eastern Seaboard tour, returning to Delaware to marry Dorothy Spence in 1940. After a promised payment for his cabaret writing fell through, he took a job as a sheet metal worker at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation during World War II to support his family. The machinery noise damaged his hearing, and a graveyard shift caused chronic insomnia.