Actors - Robert Mitchum

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	Actors - Robert Mitchum

Robert Charles Durman Mitchum (August 6, 1917 – July 1, 1997) was an accomplished American film actor and singer. He was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Mitchum is largely remembered for his starring roles in several major works of the film noir genre, and is considered a forerunner of the antiheroes prevalent in film during the 1950s and '60s.

Life and career

Early life and career

Robert Mitchum was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut on August 6, 1917 to shipyard and railroad worker James Thomas Mitchum and Ann Gunderson Mitchum, a Norwegian immigrant and sea captain's daughter. His father was a former soldier and known barroom brawler of Scots-Irish ancestry (on his father's side) and Blackfoot descent (on his mother's side). James Mitchum was crushed to death in a shipyard accident when Mitchum was eighteen months old, leaving Ann to find work as a linotype operator at a newspaper.

Throughout Robert's childhood, he was known as a prankster, often involved in fistfights and pranks. When he was 12, Ann sent Robert to live with his grandparents in Felton, Delaware, where he was promptly expelled from his middle school for scuffling with a principal. A year later, in 1930, he moved in with his older sister, waitress and stage actress Julie (originally Annette) Mitchum, in New York's Hell's Kitchen. After being expelled from Haaran High School, he left his sister and traveled throughout the country on railroad cars, taking a number of jobs including a ditch-digger for the Civilian Conservation Corps and a professional boxer. He experienced numerous adventures during his years as one of the Depression era's "wild boys of the road." In Savannah, Georgia he was arrested for vagrancy and put on a local chain gang. By Mitchum's own account he escaped and returned to his family in Delaware. It was during this time, while recovering from injuries that nearly lost him a leg, that he met the woman he would marry, a teenaged Dorothy Spence. He soon went back on the road, eventually riding the rails to California.

Mitchum arrived in Long Beach, California in 1936, staying again with his sister Julie. Soon the rest of the Mitchum family joined them in Long Beach. It was sister Julie who convinced Robert to join the local theater guild with her. In his years with the Players Guild of Long Beach, he made a living as a stagehand and occasional bit player in plays. He also wrote several short pieces which were performed by the guild. According to Lee Server's biography (Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care), Mitchum put a talent for poetry to work writing song lyrics and monologues for his sister Julie's nightclub performances. In 1940 he returned East to marry Dorothy, taking her back to California. He remained a footloose character until the birth of their first child, Jim, nicknamed Josh (two more children would follow, Christopher and Petrine). Robert then got a steady job as a machine operator with the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation . An apparent nervous breakdown from this encounter with conformity led him to look for work as an actor or extra in movies. An agent he had met got him an interview with the producer of the Hopalong Cassidy
series of B-westerns and he was hired to play the villain in several films in the series between 1942 and 1943. He continued to find further as an extra and supporting actor in numerous productions for various studios. After impressing director Mervyn LeRoy during the making of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Mitchum signed a seven year contract with RKO Radio Pictures. He found himself groomed for B Western stardom in a series of Zane Grey adaptations.

Following the moderately successful western Nevada, Mitchum was loaned out from RKO to United Artists for the William Wellman-helmed The Story of G.I. Joe
. In the film, he portrayed war-weary officer Bill Walker, who remains resolute despite the troubles he faces. 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. At the 1946 Academy Awards, the film was nominated for four Oscars, including Mitchum's only nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He finished the year off with a western (West of the Pecos) and another war film (Till the End of Time), before transitioning into a genre that came to define both Mitchum's career and screen persona: film noir.

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Actors - Robert Mitchum

Life and career

Early life and career

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