Robert Mitchum, 79, Dies; Actor With Rugged Dignity
July 2, 1997
Robert Mitchum, the insouciant actor whose heavy-lidded eyes gazed on the world with cynical amusement as he radiated rugged strength in more than 100 movies, died in his sleep yesterday at his home in Santa Barbara, California. He was 79.
The Associated Press reported that he had been suffering from emphysema for more than a year and was told in the spring that he had lung cancer. He was a heavy smoker and often posed with a cigarette.
Throughout his long career, Mr. Mitchum pretended to regard his profession casually, repeatedly remarking in his droning baritone, ''It sure beats working.''
But associates respected him as one of the most talented and dedicated people in their profession,
a no-nonsense craftsman who was always punctual, word-perfect in his lines, and a battler for making his movies better.
He appeared in war movies, westerns, and film noir.
He started out as a villain in Hopalong Cassidy movies.
Later he portrayed heroic G.I.'s and battle-weary officers, flinty private eyes, and a few homicidal killers.
''I think when producers have a part that's hard to cast, they say, 'Send for Mitchum; he'll do anything,' ''
he once remarked facetiously, ''I don't care what I play. I'll play Polish gays, women, midgets, anything.''
Off the screen in his early years, he accumulated a reputation as a bad boy, a ladies' man. and outlaw who shocked naive movie fans in the 1940s when he was arrested on a marijuana charge at the home of a starlet.
In her 1995 memoir, ''My Lucky Stars,'' Shirley MacLaine recalled her affair with Mr. Mitchum when they starred in 1962 in ''Two for the Seesaw.''
''He saw himself as a common stiff, born to be lonely, who should expect nothing from life except that the roof doesn't leak,'' she wrote.
His first major role, as a dedicated infantry officer in ''The Story of G.I. Joe,'' a film about Ernie Pyle's war reporting, won him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor in 1945.
Other major portrayals were of a cynical private detective in ''Out of the Past'' (1947), a sympathetic and romantic hunter in ''Rachel and the Stranger'' (1948), and a weary rodeo performer in ''The Lusty Men'' (1952).
In ''The Night of the Hunter'' (1955), which was directed by Charles Laughton, Mr. Mitchum personified evil
as a crazed evangelist, a terrifying killer who had the words ''Love'' and ''Hate'' tattooed on his hands.
He portrayed a gallant marine opposite Deborah Kerr's nun in ''Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison'' (1957),
an earthy Australian sheep drover in ''The Sundowners'' (1960) and a sadistic killer in ''Cape Fear'' (1962).
Mr. Mitchum helped to popularize film noir in the 1940s and was a major figure in the 1970's revival of the somber, cynical genre, with movies like ''The Friends of Eddie Coyle'' (1973) and remakes of ''Farewell, My Lovely'' (1975) and ''The Big Sleep'' (1978), in which he played Raymond Chandler's noble private eye, Philip Marlowe.
Other Mitchum films included ''Pursued'' (1947), ''Crossfire'' (1947), ''Blood on the Moon'' (1948), ''Angel Face'' (1953), ''Track of the Cat'' (1954), ''River of No Return'' (1954, with Marilyn Monroe), ''Home From the Hill'' (1960), ''El Dorado'' (1967), ''Secret Ceremony'' (1968), ''Ryan's Daughter'' (1970), ''That Championship Season'' (1982)
and ''Mr. North'' (1988).
On television, he was Victor (Pug) Henry, the pivotal character in an 18-hour 1983 mini-series,
''The Winds of War,'' based on the novel by Herman Wouk.
Mitchum was one of the stars of the TV sequel, ''War and Remembrance,'' in 1988.
In a review of Mr. Mitchum's 1971 film ''Going Home,'' Vincent Canby of The New York Times said the actor
had ''reached that point in his career where he doesn't seem to act as much as inhabit whatever film he's in, whatever role he's playing, whether it's an Irish schoolmaster, an Australian sheepherder or, as here, a nice, well-meaning garage mechanic with a talent for bowling.''
The Mitchum image was evident at the start of his career when he first generated a world-weary toughness. Audiences' interest was reinforced by tales of his uprooted childhood, adventuresome youth, colorful early jobs, and a brief imprisonment for vagrancy at age 16 in Georgia, where he was put on a chain gang.
When reporters asked him what jail was like, he replied, ''It's just like Palm Springs without the riffraff.''
Admirers hailed him for infusing flimsy characters with unexpected force, credibility, and dignity and for doing laconic wonders with routine phrases.
Detractors accused him of appearing sullen, bored, and stagey and of relying on a sneaky humor and swagger that approached self-parody.
He attributed his trademark sleepy-eyed look to chronic insomnia and a boxing injury that resulted in astigmatism. He once said, ''I agree with the producer who said I looked like a shark with a broken nose.''
A hard-drinking, chain-smoking man who was a colorful raconteur, Mr. Mitchum fielded interviewers' questions with yarns, usually profane and often hilarious.
He often tried to rattle questioners with rudeness and sarcasm and sometimes vulgarity.
''When you're successful in the movies,'' he remarked in 1970, ''Hollywood doesn't let you do better.
They just let you do more.''
With typical self-deprecation, he said in 1978: ''Half the time you have to have fun with a role.
What else is there to do with it?
You develop a facility -- and I've had it for a long time -- or you read dialogue that no one else
would really dare read.
You just have to clean it off your teeth like hen feathers.''
In a more candid moment, however, he acknowledged: ''I like the work. I just don't like talking about it.''
Robert Charles Mitchum was born in Bridgeport, Conn., on Aug. 6, 1917, to James Mitchum, a railroad worker of Irish descent, and Anne Mitchum, the daughter of a Norwegian ship captain.
When Robert was 2, his father was killed in a switching accident, and his mother became a Linotype operator
to help support her three children.
Robert left school at the age of 14 and made frequent freight-hopping trips around the country, working
as a laborer, coal miner, boxer, and aircraft assembler.
Run-ins with the police gave him a lifelong antipathy to authority.
He and Dorothy Spence, his high school sweetheart, were married in 1940 and lived most of the time in Southern California while avoiding Hollywood's social scene.
He is survived by his wife, of Montecido, Calif.; two sons, James, of Paradise Valley, Ariz., and Christopher, of Santa Barbara, Calif.; a daughter, Petrine, of Burbank, Calif.; a brother, John, of Sonora, Calif., and two sisters, Julie Mitchum of Sonora and Carol Allen of Hendersonville, Tenn.
Resolving on a theatrical career, he acted, directed, and wrote in a community theater group in Long Beach, California.
He entered the movies as an extra and became a skilled horseman to play a string of villains in Westerns.
''For a while, it looked like I was going to be stuck in westerns,'' he told an interviewer in 1948.
''I figured out I could make 6 a year for 60 years and then retire. I decided I didn't want it.
So I started blinking my eyes every time a gun went off in the scenes. That got me out of westerns.''
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