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American actor (1917–1997) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Robert Charles Durman Mitchum (August 6, 1917 – July 1, 1997) was an American actor. He is known for his antihero roles and film noir appearances. He received nominations for an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1984 and the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1992. Mitchum is rated number 23 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male stars of classic American cinema.[1]
Robert Mitchum | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Mitchum in 1949 | |
| Born | Robert Charles Durman Mitchum August 6, 1917 Bridgeport, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Died | July 1, 1997 (aged 79) Santa Barbara, California, U.S. |
| Resting place | Cremated; Ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean |
| Occupations |
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| Years active | 1937–1995 |
| Political party | Republican |
| Spouse |
Dorothy Spence
(m. 1940) |
| Children | 3, including James and Christopher Mitchum |
| Relatives |
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| Signature | |
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Mitchum rose to prominence with an Academy Award nomination for the Best Supporting Actor for The Story of G.I. Joe (1945). His best-known films include 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). He is also known for his television role as U.S. Navy Captain Victor "Pug" Henry in the epic miniseries The Winds of War (1983) and sequel War and Remembrance (1988).
Film critic Roger Ebert called Mitchum his favorite movie star and the soul of film noir: "With his deep, laconic voice and his long face and those famous weary eyes, he was the kind of guy you'd picture in a saloon at closing time, waiting for someone to walk in through the door and break his heart."[2] David Thomson wrote: "Since the war, no American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods."[3]
Robert Charles Durman Mitchum was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on August 6, 1917, into a Methodist family of Scots-Irish, Native American, and Norwegian descent.[4][5][6] His father, James Thomas Mitchum, a shipyard and railroad worker, was of Scots-Irish and Native American descent,[4][7][6][note 1] and his mother, Ann Harriet Gunderson, was a Norwegian immigrant and sea captain's daughter.[7][6] His older sister, Annette (known as Julie Mitchum during her acting career),[10] was born in 1914.[11] James was crushed to death in a railyard accident in Charleston, South Carolina, in February 1919.[12] Ann was pregnant at the time, and was awarded a government pension. She returned to Connecticut after staying for some time in her husband's hometown of Lane, South Carolina. Her third child, John, was born in September 1919.[12][note 2]
When all of the children were old enough to attend school, Ann found employment as a linotype operator for the Bridgeport Post.[14] She married Lieutenant Hugh "The Major" Cunningham Morris, a former Royal Naval Reserve officer. They had a daughter, Carol Morris, born c. 1928 on the family farm in Delaware.[15]
As a child, Mitchum was known as a prankster, often involved in fistfights and mischief.[16][17] In 1926, his mother sent him and his younger brother to live with her parents on a farm near Woodside, Delaware.[4][18] He attended Felton High School,[19] where he was expelled for mischief.[20] During his years at the Felton school, he ran away from home for the first time at age 11.[21][22]
In 1929, Mitchum and his younger brother were sent to Philadelphia to live with their older sister, Julie,[23] who had started her career as a performer in vaudeville acts on the East Coast.[24] The following year, he and the rest of the family moved to New York with Julie, sharing an apartment in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen with her and her husband.[23][25] Mitchum attended Haaren High School[26] but was eventually expelled.[27]
Mitchum left home at age 14[28] and traveled throughout the country, hopping freight cars[29] and taking a number of jobs, including ditch digging, fruit picking, and dishwashing.[16][30] In the summer of 1933, he was arrested for vagrancy in Savannah, Georgia and put in a local chain gang.[16][31][32][note 3] By Mitchum's account, he escaped and hitchhiked to Rising Sun, Delaware, where his family had moved.[16][33] That fall, at age 16, while recovering from injuries that nearly cost him a leg, he met 14-year-old Dorothy Spence, whom he would later marry.[34][31][35]
Mitchum worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps for a few months, digging ditches and planting trees, before going back on the road in July 1934.[36][16] He headed for Long Beach, California, where his older sister had moved with her husband.[37][38] The rest of the family soon also arrived and moved in with Julie.[39] For the next three years, Mitchum continued traveling across the country and taking various jobs.[40] He participated in 27 professional boxing matches but retired from the ring after a fight that broke his nose and left a scar on his left eye.[41][42][note 4]
By 1937, Mitchum had settled in Long Beach, California.[43] His older sister, Julie, tried to return to show business and became a member of the Players Guild, a local theater group.[44] Often accompanying her home after her rehearsals, he took an interest in the group's productions and became acquainted with her colleagues.[43][45] With his mother's encouragement,[46] Mitchum joined the Players Guild and made his stage debut in August 1937.[47][48] He continued appearing in their productions[49][50] and also wrote two children's plays.[51][52] After Julie began working as a cabaret singer, he started writing lyrics for her and other performers.[53] In 1939, he wrote and composed an oratorio that was presented at a Jewish-refugee-benefit show, produced and directed by Orson Welles.[41][54]
In late 1939, Mitchum was hired by astrologer Carroll Righter as an assistant for an Eastern Seaboard tour.[55][56][57][note 5] He returned to Delaware to marry Dorothy Spence in 1940 during this trip and then moved back to California with her.[60][61] He quit his work as a writer for cabaret acts after a promised payment failed to materialize.[62] Intending to provide a steady income for his family after his wife became pregnant, Mitchum took a job as a sheet metal worker at the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation during World War II.[63][64] He acted part-time for a while, and his last stage appearance before his entrance into films was in 1941.[65][66][note 6] The noise of the machinery at Lockheed damaged his hearing.[67] Assigned to a graveyard shift, he suffered from chronic insomnia and went temporarily blind. Told by his doctors that his illness was caused by job-related anxieties, he left Lockheed.[68][16][69]
Mitchum then sought work as a film actor.[70] An agent he knew from his work in theater got him an interview with Harry Sherman, the producer of United Artists' Hopalong Cassidy Western film series, which starred William Boyd.[71][72] In June 1942, Mitchum began his film career with a part as a minor villain in Border Patrol, the first of seven Hopalong Cassidy films he made that were released in 1943.[73][74] That year, he appeared in a total of 19 films.[75] His first non-Western was Follow the Band, a musical at Universal,[76] and he went uncredited as a soldier in The Human Comedy, a major MGM picture starring Mickey Rooney.[77] Other films in which he played supporting parts included a Laurel and Hardy comedy, The Dancing Masters,[78] and two war films starring Randolph Scott, Corvette K-225[79] and Gung Ho!.[80][81] Harry Cohn offered him a studio contract after viewing his performance in Columbia's musical Doughboys in Ireland. Mitchum, however, declined the offer.[82][83]
Mitchum's first important role was in When Strangers Marry, a thriller directed by William Castle and released by Monogram in 1944.[84][85][86] Opposite Dean Jagger and Kim Hunter, he played a salesman who helps his former girlfriend solve a murder mystery. Mitchum received positive reviews for his performance, and in retrospect, the film is considered a fine example of B movies.[86] That same year, he was cast in a small role in the war film Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, starring Van Johnson and Robert Walker and featuring Spencer Tracy in a guest performance.[87] Director Mervyn LeRoy was impressed by Mitchum's talent and recommended him to RKO.[88]
On May 25, 1944, Mitchum signed a seven-year contract with RKO at an initial salary of $350 per week, effective June 1. David O. Selznick's Vanguard Films bought a piece of the contract.[89] Mitchum's first film for RKO was Girl Rush (1944), a comedy starring Brown and Carney.[90] He was groomed for B-Western stardom in two Zane Grey adaptations, Nevada (1944)[91] and West of the Pecos (1945),[92] with the former marking his first time receiving star billing.[93] Both films did well at the box office[94] and received positive reviews from critics.[92]
Following the filming of the two Westerns, RKO lent Mitchum to independent producer Lester Cowan for a prominent supporting actor role in The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), directed by William A. Wellman.[95] He portrayed a war-weary officer based on Captain Henry T. Waskow, who remains resolute despite the troubles he faces.[96] The film, which followed the life of an ordinary soldier through the eyes of journalist Ernie Pyle, played by Burgess Meredith, became an instant critical and commercial success.[97][98] General Dwight D. Eisenhower called it the greatest war picture he had ever seen.[99] Before its release, Mitchum was drafted into the United States Army, serving at Fort MacArthur, California, as a medic.[100] The Story of G.I. Joe was nominated for four Academy Awards,[101] including Mitchum's only nomination for an Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actor.[102] The film established Mitchum as a star,[97] and nearly three decades later, Andrew Sarris described his performance as "extraordinarily haunting" in The Village Voice.[103]
In 1946, Mitchum appeared in Till the End of Time, Edward Dmytryk's box office hit about returning Marine veterans, with Dorothy McGuire and Guy Madison,[104][105] before migrating to a genre that came to define his career and screen persona: film noir.[38]
Mitchum ultimately became best known for his work in film noir.[38] He was cast as the second lead in two noirs in 1946. On a loan-out to MGM, he costarred with Katharine Hepburn and Robert Taylor in Vincente Minnelli's Undercurrent, playing a troubled, sensitive man entangled in the affairs of his tycoon brother and his brother's suspicious wife.[106] At RKO, he appeared in John Brahm's The Locket, playing a bitter ex-boyfriend to Laraine Day's femme fatale.[107] The latter, noted for its use of multi-layered flashbacks, has become a cult classic.[108]
Mitchum's career took a significant turn in 1947.[109] He was loaned to Warner Bros. for Raoul Walsh's Pursued, costarring Teresa Wright, playing a character who attempts to recall his past and find those responsible for killing his family. It was his first high-budget Western[110] and is generally considered the first noir Western in American cinema.[111][112]