The Full Biography
Robert Mitchum. Actor. The Bridgeport drifter whose sleepy eyes made film noir a human weather, then spent the last decades as television’s war captain and a man who refused to act impressed.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a false preacher with LOVE and HATE tattooed across his knuckles, or a gas-station owner who already knows the blonde will ruin him, or Max Cady smiling at a family from the other side of the law. The years are 1955, 1947, 1962. What the still cannot show is Robert Charles Durman Mitchum of Bridgeport, a boy whose father was crushed in a railyard, a teenager who rode freights and did time on a Georgia chain gang, and a husband who stayed married to the same Delaware girl from 1940 until the morning he died in Santa Barbara.
He was born on August 6, 1917, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to James Thomas Mitchum, a shipyard and railroad worker, and Ann Harriet Gunderson, a Norwegian immigrant and a sea captain’s daughter. James was killed in a Charleston railyard in February 1919. Ann was pregnant. She went back to Connecticut, raised three children — Annette, who would act as Julie Mitchum; Robert; and John, born after the accident — and set type for the Bridgeport Post. She married a former Royal Naval Reserve officer, Hugh Cunningham Morris. The house was Methodist, then itinerant. Robert was a prankster and a fighter. At eleven he ran away. His mother sent the boys to a Delaware farm, then to Philadelphia to live with Julie, then to Hell’s Kitchen. Haaren High School expelled him. At fourteen he left home for good.
He hopped freights. He dug ditches, picked fruit, washed dishes. In the summer of 1933 Savannah put him on a chain gang for vagrancy. He escaped, by his own account, and hitchhiked to Rising Sun, Delaware, where the family had moved. Recovering from injuries that nearly cost him a leg, he met fourteen-year-old Dorothy Spence. He boxed twenty-seven professional fights and quit after a broken nose and a scar over the left eye. He worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps, then went west to Long Beach, where Julie had gone. He joined the Players Guild because she was in it. He wrote lyrics for her cabaret act. In 1939 he wrote an oratorio that Orson Welles produced for a Jewish-refugee benefit. In 1940, on a tour as assistant to the astrologer Carroll Righter, he went home to Delaware and married Dorothy. They went back to California. He took a sheet-metal job at Lockheed so there would be a paycheck when the baby came. The machinery damaged his hearing. Graveyard shifts gave him insomnia and a spell of temporary blindness. Doctors told him to leave the plant. He did.
The door was a Hopalong Cassidy Western.
An agent from the theater days got him in front of Harry Sherman. In June 1942 Mitchum started as a minor villain in Border Patrol, the first of seven Hopalong pictures released in 1943. That year he appeared in nineteen films: bits, soldiers, a Laurel and Hardy comedy, two Randolph Scott war pictures. Harry Cohn offered a Columbia contract after Doughboys in Ireland. Mitchum declined. His first part that counted was William Castle’s When Strangers Marry (1944), a Monogram thriller opposite Dean Jagger and Kim Hunter. Mervyn LeRoy noticed him in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and sent him to RKO. On May 25, 1944, he signed a seven-year contract at $350 a week. David O. Selznick bought a piece of it. RKO put him in Zane Grey Westerns, Nevada and West of the Pecos, then lent him to Lester Cowan for William Wellman’s The Story of G.I. Joe (1945). He played a war-weary captain based on Henry T. Waskow, seen through Ernie Pyle’s eyes. Eisenhower called it the greatest war picture he had ever seen. Before the film opened, Mitchum was drafted and served as a medic at Fort MacArthur. The picture earned four Oscar nominations. His, for Best Supporting Actor, was the only Academy nomination of his life.
What came next was not a lucky streak. It was a run that defined a genre.
Till the End of Time (1946) put him among returning Marines. Then the noirs: Vincente Minnelli’s Undercurrent with Katharine Hepburn and Robert Taylor; John Brahm’s The Locket; Raoul Walsh’s Pursued (1947), the first real noir Western, opposite Teresa Wright; Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire, RKO’s most profitable film of 1947, five Oscar nominations, Mitchum as a soldier in a murder that is also an antisemitic crime. Then Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947), with Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas and Nicholas Musuraca’s light. He played Jeff Bailey, a small-town gas-station man whose unfinished business walks in the door. Bosley Crowther called him magnificently cheeky. The picture is now treated as one of the central American noirs, and Mitchum as the face the genre needed: heavy lids, a voice that did not hurry, a man who already knew how the night would end.
On September 1, 1948, detectives walked into a Laurel Canyon party and arrested him with actress Lila Leeds for marijuana possession. RKO could have invoked the morals clause. Howard Hughes kept him. He served fifty days, split between the Los Angeles County Jail and a Castaic prison farm, and was released on March 30, 1949. Life photographed him mopping in prison denim. He told reporters jail was like Palm Springs, but without the riff-raff. The conviction was thrown out on January 31, 1951, as a setup. The public did not drop him. Rachel and the Stranger, rushed out to use the headlines, became one of RKO’s top grossers of 1948. Robert Wise’s Blood on the Moon, The Red Pony for Lewis Milestone, Don Siegel’s The Big Steal with Greer again, and the Christmas picture Holiday Affair with Janet Leigh kept him working. By the end of the decade he was RKO’s biggest star. Hughes bought Selznick’s share of the contract for $400,000.
The early 1950s were Hughes weather: Where Danger Lives, His Kind of Woman and Macao with Jane Russell, The Racket, Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1952) with Susan Hayward, Otto Preminger’s Angel Face (1953) with Jean Simmons. Then, as a freelancer after the RKO contract expired in August 1954, Preminger’s River of No Return with Marilyn Monroe, Wellman’s Track of the Cat in the snow at Mount Rainier, and Stanley Kramer’s Not as a Stranger. In 1955 Charles Laughton, directing his only feature, cast him as Preacher Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter. The film failed in its first run. It is now among the pictures a serious list cannot omit. The hymn in the dark, the knuckles, the voice on the basement stairs — “Chillll-dren?” — became a civic object. Roger Ebert wrote that nobody who has seen it has forgotten it.
John Huston’s Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) put him on an island with Deborah Kerr as a nun. He produced and starred in Thunder Road (1958), a moonshine picture he also helped write; the ballad he co-wrote became a hit. He recorded a calypso album, Calypso — is like so…, the same year. Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners (1960) with Kerr again showed the gentleness under the slouch. Cape Fear (1962) made him Max Cady, an ex-convict who smiles while he ruins a family. El Dorado (1966) put him opposite John Wayne for Howard Hawks. David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter (1970) asked him for a cuckolded Irish schoolteacher and got a performance the town had not ordered from the sleepy tough. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) and Farewell, My Lovely (1975) brought him back to the night as an older man who still knew the rooms.
I have two acting styles: with and without a horse.Robert Mitchum
The turn is the refusal to treat stardom as a religion. He cultivated indifference. He claimed the work was easy. The best pictures show a watchful intelligence under the lids. He stayed married to Dorothy through the arrest, the Hughes years, the location work, and the gossip. They had three children: James, Christopher, and Petrine. James and Christopher acted. The household was not a publicity marriage. It was a Delaware girl and a man who had already been on a chain gang before the first close-up.
Six things most people never knew
- A Georgia chain gang held him at sixteen. Savannah booked him for vagrancy in 1933. He escaped and hitchhiked home. The tough-guy file started before RKO existed.
- Lockheed nearly blinded him. Sheet-metal night shifts damaged his hearing, wrecked his sleep, and put him in a doctor’s office with temporary blindness. Acting was the job he took after the factory told him to leave.
- The 1948 marijuana bust was thrown out as a setup. He served fifty days. The conviction was overturned in 1951. RKO did not drop him. The public made the arrest into a legend he never had to invent.
- He wrote an oratorio for Orson Welles. In 1939, before the Hopalong pictures, Welles staged Mitchum’s piece at a benefit for Jewish refugees.
- He made a calypso record that charted. Calypso — is like so… arrived in 1957. “The Ballad of Thunder Road,” which he co-wrote, became a hit of its own.
- His only Oscar nomination came before the noirs that last. The Story of G.I. Joe, 1945. The preacher, the gas-station man, and Max Cady never received another nomination.
He left the grind of being only a movie star without announcing a retirement. Television wanted a face that could hold a war.
The later years
Home, by then, was Santa Barbara County — Montecito weather, a house Dorothy kept, dogs, and a man who still took the work when the script did not insult him. He was not a recluse. He was a professional who had stopped pretending the premiere was the point. In 1983 ABC’s The Winds of War, from Herman Wouk, cast him as Captain Victor “Pug” Henry, a naval officer whose family is scattered across the first years of the Second World War. The miniseries ran seven nights. It was an event the way a studio picture had once been an event. He was in his mid-sixties, heavier, the lids even heavier, and he played Pug as a man who does not orate. The audience that had known him as Cady and Powell discovered he could hold a living room for a week.
The sequel, War and Remembrance (1988–89), asked even more hours. He was older. The production was vast. He finished it. Between the two miniseries he kept a film schedule that was not a victory lap: That Championship Season (1982); The Ambassador (1984), shot in Israel, a picture he did not enjoy; Mr. North (1988); Scrooged (1988) as a television executive; The Package (1989). In 1991 Martin Scorsese remade Cape Fear with Robert De Niro as Cady. Mitchum took a part as a detective — a courtesy and a passing of the threat. In 1995 Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man put him in a Western that did not want his old studio smile. One of his last jobs was the 1997 television picture James Dean: Race with Destiny, playing George Stevens. He had already been ill. He kept the date.
In 1984 he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1992 the Golden Globes gave him the Cecil B. DeMille Award. He accepted it the way he accepted most honors — as if someone had handed him a plate he had not ordered. He smoked. He drank. He did not perform a health conversion for the columns. Lung cancer and emphysema were in the file. Dorothy was in the house. The sons were in the business he had never asked them to treat as a cathedral. He died on July 1, 1997, in Santa Barbara. He was seventy-nine. The ashes went into the Pacific. Jimmy Stewart had died the day before. The obituaries paired them as if the century had decided to close two kinds of American face at once: the decent one and the one that would not explain itself.
The last public Mitchum was not the preacher. It was an old professional on a soundstage, doing the hours, going home to Dorothy, and declining to write a memoir that would make the indifference into a brand. He had already said the useful sentence. Movies bored him, especially his own. The pictures that last suggest he was lying about the boredom and telling the truth about the vanity.
After he was gone
Dorothy outlived him until 2014. James and Christopher kept working. John, the brother born after the railyard, had already gone in 2001. The films did not need a foundation to stay in the repertory. Out of the Past still teaches what a close-up can withhold. The Night of the Hunter still frightens children who are no longer children. The original Cape Fear still makes a living room unsafe. The Winds of War still plays on the channels that remember when a miniseries could stop a week. The knuckles are a Halloween costume and a film-school slide. The man who wore them was a Bridgeport orphan, a Lockheed metal worker, a fifty-day prisoner, a husband of fifty-seven years, and a star who treated the studio as a job site. If you only remember the lids, you have the photograph. If you remember the chain gang and the house in Santa Barbara, you have him.
Movies bore me, especially my own.Robert Mitchum
The still of the preacher will last. It should. But the life behind it was longer, harder, and more domestic than the hymn in the dark can say. He came out of a railyard death, found the one kind of stillness the camera would take, and then, when the camera had had its decade, he put the same face on a television war and went home. That is the arc. That is the story.
Portrait: Bjørn Fjørtoft · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons