Robert Mitchum

One of Hollywood's most tantalizing stars of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, Robert Mitchum was a performer who never wanted to be a star.

His early life and famous 1948 conviction for possession of marijuana suggested some of the qualities he would bring to his screen roles as tough and hard-working but restless, alienated and unfocused heroes.

His family moved around and Mitchum boarded with relatives before he ran away from home and was eventually arrested for vagrancy.

He worked as a coal miner, boxer and shoe store clerk before drifting into acting as a career. Heavy-lidded and sleepy-eyed, with a seductive speaking voice, a barrel chest and a prominent cleft in his chin, Mitchum began his film career in 1942 and played a string of heavies in western features before coming to prominence with his role as the heroic Lt. Walker in The Story of G.I. Joe.

Mitchum's deceptively relaxed style and combination of insolence and charm produced many memorable performances, notably in the dark psychological Western Pursued, the definitive film noir Out of the Past and, as Philip Marlowe, in Farewell My Lovely. Mitchum was a key personification of the noir sensibility, his sluggish, sexy vulnerability making him an ideal dupe for screen femme fatales.

The rough-hewn but often playfully rowdy aspects of his persona also adapted themselves well to the Western, from the noirish Blood on the Moon to the fine saga of disenchanted rodeo riders, The Lusty Men to the comic hijinks of his drunken sot in El Dorado.

His quiet brand of artistry also enabled him to shine in roles that could easily have been overplayed; he was truly outstanding, for example, in such psychologically complex roles as the brutal father of Home from the Hill. By the same token, there was often an insinuating trace of flamboyance in Mitchum's performance style, which made all the more striking those parts which he played with all the stops out, as in two roles in which he came to seem the personification of evil: as a brutal ex-con who seeks to destroy the lawyer responsible for his conviction, in Cape Fear; and, even more memorably, as a murderous itinerant preacher who preys upon two defenseless children, in The Night of the Hunter.

Mitchum's peak period was from the late 40s through the early 60s, and though he made films opposite such completely inappropriate co-stars as Katharine Hepburn and Ann Blyth he also teamed briefly but memorably with two stars who highlighted different aspects of his acting persona. In His Kind of Woman and Macao, Mitchum's low-key, glumly wisecracking wanderer found a perfect mirror reflection in the sullen, impudent magnetism of Jane Russell as the camera regularly highlighted their equally photogenic chests. Beginning with the touching, two-character WWII story of a nun and a solider, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, and peaking with the marvelous study of an Australian sheepherder who can't settle down, The Sundowners, Mitchum found another ideal co-star who brought out his gentler, rough diamond qualities, Deborah Kerr.

One of the most durable of Hollywood leading men and, until fairly recently, one of its more underrated actors, Mitchum has continued to appear in films through the 90s. The mid-60s saw the beginning of a general decline into routine Westerns (Villa Rides 1968), strange melodramas (Secret Ceremony 1968, The Wrath of God 1972) and the occasional modest comedy (Mister Moses 1965, Matilda 1978).

Mitchum's subtle work as a schoolteacher, though, was the best thing about David Lean's handsome but vastly overblown quasi-epic, Ryan's Daughter and he also appeared in such interesting films as the sensitive The Yakuza and the moody The Big Sleep, where he reprised his Philip Marlowe role.

A versatile performer, during the 80's he concentrated on several TV miniseries. These relied more on an increasingly stolid stalwartness, only partly due to age but accruing naturally to his legendary status, rather than on the simmering physical dynamism he had embodied for so long. If Mitchum sometimes did seem stiffer and a bit more inert, he lent considerable dignity to his narration for Tombstone (1993) and made a welcome cameo in the remake of Cape Fear.

Most importantly, Robert Mitchum proved that the image of the tough but weary ne'er-do-well turned reluctant hero could not only be the stock-in-trade of an often superb actor, but could also prove to be almost inspirational for generations of moviegoers.

He died in Santa Barbara on Jul 1st, 1997.